Frederick Turner (poet)

When his epic was reprinted in 2011, Turner included a foreword written after rereading his work. Turner commented that, unlike the works of Isaac Asimov and most other science fiction writers of the 1970s and '80s, The New World had correctly predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse without the mass destruction of a nuclear war. Turner further commented, "The poem's identification of fanatical authoritarian monotheistic fundamentalism (Christian and Islamic) as engaged in a struggle with mindless hedonism on the one side and free democratic syncretism on the other seems pretty much on target."

During the early 2000s, James Matthew Wilson wrote, "Turner has spent several decades engaged on a consciously syncretistic quest to draw the findings of neuroscience, physics, anthropology, and Eastern and Western religions into a coherent vision of culture and the world as they shape and are shaped by human nature. As Turner argued in A Culture of Hope (1995), this quest is neither Liberal or Conservative, but one that shared the best insights of both. He views liberalism and Capitalism as indicative of human nature's dynamic, iconoclastic but also inventive, culture-making character, while he believes with Conservatives that the cultural productions that most befit human nature will always be Classical in character, though a Classicism renovated by human choices in every age. The argument for this position was first set forth in the aptly titled Natural Classicism (1986)..."

In his 1995 book The Culture of Hope, Turner sharply criticized the Counterculture of the 1960s, writing, "When one seeks for radical equality, and a total pruning of the tree of authority, one gets an Oliver Cromwell, a Napoleon Bonaparte, a Hitler, a Lenin, a Stalin instead. In recent times, the egalitarian commune movement has given birth to such monstrosities as Charlie Manson and Jimmy Jones. Any of us who were involved in radical consciousness-raising groups in the sixties, seventies, and eighties can remember the oppressive atmosphere of thought control and authority, the way in which some unacknowledged leader emerged supported by a little coterie of moral enforcers and yes-men, and the bullying of the weak or independent."

In a 1992 collection of translated poems by Miklós Radnóti, a Hungarian Jewish war poet, convert to Roman Catholicism, and critic of the Arrow Cross Party, who was murdered by the Royal Hungarian Army during the Holocaust, Turner's co-translator was Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, a Hungarian Jewish refugee who carried a volume of Radnóti's poems in her winter-coat pocket in March 1957, when she fled from her parents' home in Budapest and defected to the West following the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Turner's second epic is the 1990 poem Genesis, which is heavily influenced by Greek Mythology and is about the human colonization of Mars. Genesis has not only, according to Turner, done well in terms of sales, "it's even been adopted by NASA."

In 1990, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote of Turner's epic, "(It) doesn't seem like an epic poem about the terraforming of Mars, using characters modeled partly on Greek mythology, would be a recipe for success. But Turner is an exceptionally skillful poet, who when he wrote this book had already completed a fascinating Mars novel, A Double Shadow (1978), and another fine book-length narrative poem, The New World (1985). Here, the Olympian grandeur of the characters and plot match well with the Martian landscape, which under its rapid terraforming is still recognizably a place established in the popular imagination by the Viking landers. The result is a triumph that deserves to be better known."

In 1985, Turner and Pöppel published their findings in the award-winning essay The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time in the magazine Poetry.

Turner also worked as visiting professor at the University of Exeter in England from 1985 until 1986. From 1986 until his retirement in September 2020, Turner was Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas.

The first is his 1985 poem The New World, which celebrates world culture in the year 2376 A.D.

He is a winner of the Milán Füst Prize (shared with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth) and the Levinson Poetry Prize, awarded by Poetry Magazine (1983). He has been described as "a universal scholar – a rare find in a world of over-specialization – whose work transects and borrows from several rather disparate fields."

After moving to the United States and working there, he was naturalized in 1977 as a U.S. citizen.

After leaving Santa Barbara, Turner worked as associate professor at Kenyon College between 1972 and 1985. Between 1979 and 1983, Turner and Ronald Sharp served as editors of The Kenyon Review, where they published both the poems and the essays of the first New Formalist poets.

After receiving his doctorate, Turner worked as assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1967 to 1972. Soon after his arrival in California in 1967, Turner's doctoral thesis, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time, was published as a book and attracted the attention of Hungarian-American philosopher and physicist Julius Thomas Fraser, who invited Turner to join the International Society for the Study of Time. While visiting Austria and attending one the Society's tri-annual conferences alongside many Nobel Prize-winning scholars from different disciplines, Turner, "got involved in one of the subgroups", that, "was interested in the neurobiological and evolutionary background of human aesthetics. Why do we find things beautiful? Why do we have the capacity to experience beauty? And why is this phenomenon so pan-cultural? Once we had the facts at our disposal, it was impossible to entertain any of these post-structuralist notions that such human forms and conventions are simply closed systems and culturally unique. In fact, it was clear that human aesthetic rose from human biology. Anyway, this subgroup got a grant from the Werner-Reimers-Stiftung, and we were able to involve even more interesting people from other disciplines ranging from physics to anthropology to music. So we began meeting over a nine-year period, and that was where our ideas about the neural lyre initiated."

He has been married to Mei Lin Turner, whom he met as a fellow undergraduate at Oxford University, since 1966 and has two sons.

Between 1962 and 1967, Turner attended the University of Oxford, where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. in English Language and Literature. At Oxford, Turner's thesis supervisor was Helen Gardner. Turner's other examiners were Lord David Cecil and John Bayley, the husband of novelist Iris Murdoch.

In 1955, Victor Turner accepted a position at the University of Manchester and the family returned to England.

In 1952, Turner's father accepted an assignment funded by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute to study the Eastern Ndembu people of Northern Rhodesia. While talking with Baer, Turner recalled the voyage, "...it was a marvellous seven days on the ocean, sailing down the Atlantic Ocean and seeing Ascension Island and all the other sights along the way."

Frederick Turner (born 1943) is an English–American poet affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism. He is the author of two full-length science fiction epic poems, The New World and Genesis; several books of his poetry and literary translations; and a number of other works. He has been called "a major poet of our time".