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The New World
Set four hundred years in the future, Frederick Turner's epic poem, The New World, celebrates American culture in A.D. 2376.
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Originally published in 1985.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
- GenresPoetry
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
4 people are currently reading
104 people want to read
About the author
Frederick Turner
19 books4 followersLibrarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Frederick Turner was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (equivalent to a PhD) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review.
Frederick Turner was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (equivalent to a PhD) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 4, 2025
What is it: a science-fiction epic poem about America in the 2300s written in the '80s by a guy who brushed shoulders with temporal physicists and George Steiner.
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Why 4 stars: in my review of Harry Martinson's scifi epic poem Aniara, I described a problem with nihilist poetry--that the poet's commitment to beautiful craft is itself an argument against their own claims of meaningless communication. Turner's work in The New World presents a mirror of the same problem--that the poet's expectation beautiful craft is an answer to the meaninglessness of the universe is ultimately insufficient.
To dig into that requires digging into Turner a little bit. Turner is a strange intellectual to try to summarize, given how widely he's ranged in his collaborations, but at the core of his study and written work I think is a unifying worldview: that beauty is inherently, independently, and verifiably valuable. That view has spun out into studies of the way certain rhythms and sonic speech patterns trigger specific responses within the brains of the audience. It has spun out into an academic career focused on advocating for a return to formalism as a counter-revolution to modernist and post-modernist collapse of form. It has focused his translation work to poets he sees as using meter and structure as their primary tools.
In Turner's epic poetry (The New World is the first of three scifi epic poems he's penned over his career, and you can expect I'll be reviewing the other two shortly), this manifests as constant and deliberate effort to shape a modern epic that sounds like and is structured like a classical epic. He draws generously from Homer, Virgil, and from Old and Middle English poems including Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as the raw material for the construction of his own epic.
And there is an undeniable craft at work in that effort. Turner knows the source material well enough that his epic does indeed resonate with the same patterns and shapes as those prior poems. And the lines of verse are frequently very beautiful within those forms, especially when he is leveraging the pastoral mode.
But there is also a strange consequence of this effort. The best poetry of The New World no longer comes across as Turner's. It is held by him, offered to us by him, but it isn't his. It's Homer's, or Virgil's, or it's part of the Arthurian tradition.
That's not to say Turner's absent from The New World. But it is to say that the verses where Turner is most clearly present are also the verses most disruptive to the forms he's trying to draw upon. Because Turner's own worldview, this ultimate valuation of beauty, sits within a context that for him extends to an essentially universalist humanism where the expressions of communal belief are the truest meaning rather than any content believed in; to a perspective of human violence that evaluates it on a basis of aesthetic function within the narrative of a person's life rather than holding it to a fixed ethic; and to critiques of religious fundamentalism and capitalist economic practice that may be leveled against systems that need critique but choose an angle of critique that is peculiar and ultimately impractical. There are long passages of The New World that break from the epic to instead focus on what in other contexts would be described as worldbuilding or exposition but, in Turner's voice, is very clearly his own attempt to preach to his audience about all of the above concerns. In the worst examples, I'm reminded of Ayn Rand's monologues, where a character's narrative arc is primarily designed to make them a mouthpiece for the author rather than a model or demonstration of the worldview advocated for.
This combination of factors--that the beauty of this poem lies in Turner's command of a long and broad and rich history of other poets' craft and that the thematic argument of this poem lies in Turner's interjections and interruptions of that craft--makes of The New World an experience that I think I can best describe as hollow. It is beautiful, undeniably so. There's lines here that I'd like to return to, I think. Again especially the pastoral sections. But it is a beauty that is fundamentally detached from what Turner intends to say. A line from McCarthy's The Road comes to mind: "All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." The forms are here evoked. The ceremonies performed. But Turner can't help but speak up at the same time to plea something like: aren't these forms substantive and isn't this pleasure sufficient? That he must plea suggests they are not.
It is a poem that is beautiful. It is a poem that advocates beauty is the only meaning we've got in an otherwise meaningless universe. But it is not a poem that binds those two into singular acts of coherent art, as if the beauty of the poetry cannot be trusted to bear the burden of meaning after all.
----
An aside: Turner, if you're listening, license this for movies, TV, games, anything! Warriors singing to the AI enchanting their microchip-embedded swords; a deposed world leader cursed to rule in sewers, there to forge cybernetic enhancements for a hero at his nadir; an entire pilgrimage that takes a character from airship pirates to interstellar travels and back to Midwest farmhouse in the span of a couple pages; battles with lancers on horseback complementing infantry firing lasers at tanks... this stuff would make a killer IP!
----
You might also like: the recent film The Green Knight.
----
Why 4 stars: in my review of Harry Martinson's scifi epic poem Aniara, I described a problem with nihilist poetry--that the poet's commitment to beautiful craft is itself an argument against their own claims of meaningless communication. Turner's work in The New World presents a mirror of the same problem--that the poet's expectation beautiful craft is an answer to the meaninglessness of the universe is ultimately insufficient.
To dig into that requires digging into Turner a little bit. Turner is a strange intellectual to try to summarize, given how widely he's ranged in his collaborations, but at the core of his study and written work I think is a unifying worldview: that beauty is inherently, independently, and verifiably valuable. That view has spun out into studies of the way certain rhythms and sonic speech patterns trigger specific responses within the brains of the audience. It has spun out into an academic career focused on advocating for a return to formalism as a counter-revolution to modernist and post-modernist collapse of form. It has focused his translation work to poets he sees as using meter and structure as their primary tools.
In Turner's epic poetry (The New World is the first of three scifi epic poems he's penned over his career, and you can expect I'll be reviewing the other two shortly), this manifests as constant and deliberate effort to shape a modern epic that sounds like and is structured like a classical epic. He draws generously from Homer, Virgil, and from Old and Middle English poems including Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as the raw material for the construction of his own epic.
And there is an undeniable craft at work in that effort. Turner knows the source material well enough that his epic does indeed resonate with the same patterns and shapes as those prior poems. And the lines of verse are frequently very beautiful within those forms, especially when he is leveraging the pastoral mode.
But there is also a strange consequence of this effort. The best poetry of The New World no longer comes across as Turner's. It is held by him, offered to us by him, but it isn't his. It's Homer's, or Virgil's, or it's part of the Arthurian tradition.
That's not to say Turner's absent from The New World. But it is to say that the verses where Turner is most clearly present are also the verses most disruptive to the forms he's trying to draw upon. Because Turner's own worldview, this ultimate valuation of beauty, sits within a context that for him extends to an essentially universalist humanism where the expressions of communal belief are the truest meaning rather than any content believed in; to a perspective of human violence that evaluates it on a basis of aesthetic function within the narrative of a person's life rather than holding it to a fixed ethic; and to critiques of religious fundamentalism and capitalist economic practice that may be leveled against systems that need critique but choose an angle of critique that is peculiar and ultimately impractical. There are long passages of The New World that break from the epic to instead focus on what in other contexts would be described as worldbuilding or exposition but, in Turner's voice, is very clearly his own attempt to preach to his audience about all of the above concerns. In the worst examples, I'm reminded of Ayn Rand's monologues, where a character's narrative arc is primarily designed to make them a mouthpiece for the author rather than a model or demonstration of the worldview advocated for.
This combination of factors--that the beauty of this poem lies in Turner's command of a long and broad and rich history of other poets' craft and that the thematic argument of this poem lies in Turner's interjections and interruptions of that craft--makes of The New World an experience that I think I can best describe as hollow. It is beautiful, undeniably so. There's lines here that I'd like to return to, I think. Again especially the pastoral sections. But it is a beauty that is fundamentally detached from what Turner intends to say. A line from McCarthy's The Road comes to mind: "All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." The forms are here evoked. The ceremonies performed. But Turner can't help but speak up at the same time to plea something like: aren't these forms substantive and isn't this pleasure sufficient? That he must plea suggests they are not.
It is a poem that is beautiful. It is a poem that advocates beauty is the only meaning we've got in an otherwise meaningless universe. But it is not a poem that binds those two into singular acts of coherent art, as if the beauty of the poetry cannot be trusted to bear the burden of meaning after all.
----
An aside: Turner, if you're listening, license this for movies, TV, games, anything! Warriors singing to the AI enchanting their microchip-embedded swords; a deposed world leader cursed to rule in sewers, there to forge cybernetic enhancements for a hero at his nadir; an entire pilgrimage that takes a character from airship pirates to interstellar travels and back to Midwest farmhouse in the span of a couple pages; battles with lancers on horseback complementing infantry firing lasers at tanks... this stuff would make a killer IP!
----
You might also like: the recent film The Green Knight.
July 18, 2009
Sold as a science fiction epic taking place in 24th century America, but honestly it's pretty light on the sci-fi elements and feels more like a historical epic poem. Not at creative as Genesis An Epic Poem, but still well-crafted. There are notable moments of brilliance, particularly the opening invocation.
March 5, 2017
A magnificent work! Well-realized as a heroic epic (drawing frequently, though non derivatively, from the epic and romantic traditions), exquisite in its poetry, often profound, even when ironic, and a gripping story about an American "knight", if such a thing could exist -- well worth the read for lovers of epic poetry, Arthurian Romance, or science fiction.
September 1, 2021
After such an incredible read, I find myself heart-broken, joyful, heavy of heart, and yet full of hope. This poem speaks into the great tradition of epic and breaths new life into old conversations. Exquisite imagery, moving language, and incredible story-telling all in the one. I definitely intend to come back to this soon!
February 22, 2017
"World-saving function" is a bit grandiloquent for my tastes, but this remark from the author's Introductory Note seemed pertinent: "Art has the world-saving function of imaginatively constructing other futures that do not involve the Gotterdammerung of mass suicide; because if there is no other imaginative future, we will surely indeed *choose* destruction, being as we are creatures of imagination." The epic poem itself isn't prophetic, merely amazing.
(Found after I lost an earlier copy at the West Chester Book Barn in PA.)
(Found after I lost an earlier copy at the West Chester Book Barn in PA.)
Want to read
August 26, 2013Read part of this in Future Primitive The New Ecotopias and was entranced as much by the holistic recounting of poly-sci history as the syncretistic vision of future belief. The poly-sci stuff is visible online but the updated trinitarian theology is not, sadly.
Sample nugget of wisdom: the old distinction between art and technology's gone, and so too that between poems and advertisements.
Matter, being only a weaker dilution of spirit, cannot tyrannize over its very own essence.
I do admit to being put off by the idea of SF epic verse, but this is hot stuff.
Sample nugget of wisdom: the old distinction between art and technology's gone, and so too that between poems and advertisements.
Matter, being only a weaker dilution of spirit, cannot tyrannize over its very own essence.
I do admit to being put off by the idea of SF epic verse, but this is hot stuff.
November 27, 2008
A sci-fi epic poem? Only Turner is bold enough to even try such an endeavor -- and he even manages to succeed at it. A marvelous work that shows us a disturbing future we are even now moving toward.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews