Poet-painter Elise Asher takes her title from the question asked by William Wordsworth in his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” In this opulent work of exploration and discovery she juxtaposes 47 color plates of her luminous paintings with their sources or parallels in the poems of the grate tradition. The poets who haunt her imagination and whose lines she inscribes on pages facing the paintings range from Shakespeare, Vaughan, Milton, Blake, and Keats to Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Roethke, and Kunitz. These are poems and paintings that communicate the everlasting mystery of the human experience and that reinforce each other in the search for transcendence. The Visionary Gleam is further enriched by the inclusion of passages from the free-flowing narrative of a transcontinental journey, a distillation of memory and fancy, that is also a journey in time.