The Holy Grail is the summation of Jack Spicer's explorations into perception-as-love; it is a complete phenomenology of purpose which culminates his attention to the poetic act in all his previous books. (p. 163)

[In The Holy Grail we find] a more direct engagement with experience, and … a total language generated on the spot, without recourse to prosaic modes of reference and mimicry. It no longer works through a negative to reach the positive. Also, as Spicer's principal struggle with the throes of metaphorical language, it reaches the just and ultimate extension of lyric in the forms of romance or drama…. The Holy Grail seems to clinch the entire question of perception/love as exploratory (questing) journey, and to reveal its ultimate structure as essentially a seven-fold construct. (pp. 164-65)

[Spicer said] he wrote The Holy Grail from poem to poem, deliberately striving to forget one poem before proceeding...