By Robert Crossley (University of Massachusetts Boston)
[Three-time epic poet, distinguished scholar and historian of global epic, and indefatigable advocate for epic in all its forms, Frederick Turner died in Dallas on September 4.]
I never met Frederick Turner in person—one of the regrets of my life—but he has been a presence in my life for forty years as a teacher of epic poetry, as a literary scholar, and as a writer. In the 1970s and 1980s I had been teaching an undergraduate course every three years or so on epic poetry. My students at the University of Massachusetts in Boston were an adventuresome crew—typically older, unprivileged, culturally diverse, nonresidential newcomers to literary study, but willing to try anything: the Iliad in translations by Robert Fitzgerald and Alexander Pope, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude. Over time, the Homeric translations varied and became more colloquial (Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo, the fervidly faithless Christopher Logue). But something remained missing until in 1985 the distinguished Princeton Contemporary Poets Series published an epic poem set in the twenty-fourth century in the former “Uess.” When I discovered Frederick Turner’s The New World, I read it with a sense of both wonder and familiarity. Here was evidence that a literary form that I loved was not a museum-piece but a thrillingly living entity. It began appearing on my syllabus as my concluding example of epic poetry in English.
The truth is that I didn’t really know how to teach The New World. I had no difficulty with Turner’s invention of a hybrid form of science fiction and epic poetry. But Turner’s poem was as polymathic and encyclopedic as Paradise Lost and it had already taken me a decade to begin to figure out how to teach Milton. Although I didn’t do justice to The New World, I was convinced that my students needed to read it, needed to know that there was a living poet who had written an epic that was as rich and inventive as anything they were reading by Homer or Spenser or Milton. I continued to include The New World in my course as long as Princeton kept it in print. Surprisingly, a couple of years after introducing Turner into my epic course I was approached by a student whom I had never taught who asked if he could do an independent study on Turner’s second epic poem, Genesis (1988). Although some reviewers were skeptical of the strange futuristic poems Turner was producing in the 1980s, my own small corner of the universe provided evidence that an appetite for epic still existed—and that some readers were not only untroubled by, but were positively enthralled with, verse epics in science-fictional settings.
As those who use this World Epics website undoubtedly know, Frederick Turner has been a towering figure in the effort to restore visibility and stature to the epic form. The greatest living practitioner of the epic in English, he produced three major poems—The New World, Genesis, and the remarkable and strikingly innovative Apocalypse (2016, arriving two decades after the first two). These poems pioneered the future of America, the settlement of another planet, and the global crisis of climate change as fitting themes for epic treatment. They will constitute his legacy in literary history; their vitality and cultural relevance, as well as their startling originality in taking epic narrative into the future, will ensure that Turner’s work, like Virgil’s and Wordsworth’s, will outlive their author. His creative ventures have been complemented by the magisterial monograph Epic: Form, Content, and History (2014), the culmination of decades of his advocacy for the enduring presence of epic across time and geographical boundaries and for the formal beauty, the mythic grandeur, and the art of storytelling that epic exemplifies.
Turner’s three epic poems did not always get the respect of the academic and literary establishments. But Genesis, his epic about the creation of a living Mars, drew the attention of scientists and technology entrepreneurs interested in the planet’s future settlement. NASA appointed him as a consultant in their planning for extraterrestrial exploration. In the face of reviewers who dismissed his poetic techniques as old-fashioned, were confounded by his preference for long narrative poems over confessional lyrics, and considered his affinity for science fiction vulgar, Turner remained defiant. He was capable of using his linguistic facility as an instrument of savage indignation, as in this hilarious moment in Genesis where he enumerates in rhyming couplets the talents and credentials of a book reviewer:
First, a becoming modesty of style;
The aspirations of a crocodile;
A Shiite mullah’s open-mindedness;
A moral backbone of boiled watercress;
All the prophetic vision of a sheep
(But not so witty and not quite so deep);
A diction as unblemished by a thought
As is a baby’s bottom by a wart;
You stand in the traditions of our art
As a blocked artery in a dying heart.
If Turner had one overarching ambition as an epic poet, it was to return poetry to readers, stripping away the encrustations of academic posturing, theoretical navel-gazing, and postmodernist mystification. He wanted to recover what others regarded as the primitive virtues of poetry but which he considered its “classical” properties. He was uninterested, however, in empty nostalgia or the glorification of a narrowly defined European classicism. For him, “classical” art embraced certain poetic and narrative values that transcended cultures and times, and were rooted in the pleasures of formal structure, expected rhythms and delightful sound effects, engaged storytelling, didactic power, and intimations of the sublime. Epic offers fresh and challenging ways of seeing, understanding, appreciating, criticizing, and loving the world we think we know. In an essay on teaching the Bantu epic Mwindo, Turner celebrated epic narratives as “providers of coherent alternatives and scenarios whose exploration clarifies our picture of the world” (“To Drink from the Source: Teaching the Mwindo Epic,” in Teaching World Epics, ed. Jo Ann Cavallo, Modern Language Association, 2024, 249-57: 249).
None of this is to say that Turner’s epics are easy reading. They demand unhurried and careful attention; their allusions to other writers both inside and outside Anglophone epic literature are multiple. No poet writing in English since Milton has been so learned or has drawn on such wide-ranging disciplines in the structuring of epic narratives. Turner was conversant in neuroscience, archeology, evolutionary theory, landscape design, artificial intelligence, the history of philosophy, astrophysics, not to mention the literatures of a great many cultures and time periods. I often felt myself not fully grasping passages in his three epics—but this was no barrier to rapt enjoyment. I experienced the bewildering, beguiling pleasure I knew from reading James Joyce, listening to the later symphonies of Bruckner, watching the films of Fellini. I was in the presence of—and here’s another word appropriate to Turner but out of favor these days—genius.
In the early 2000s while working on a book about the cultural history of Mars, I came upon Turner’s 1979 novel A Double Shadow—a precursor to his great poem about the terraforming of Mars—and finally decided to get in touch with him. Our correspondence continued intermittently until this past summer, six weeks before his death. What I discovered through my email exchanges with Fred—as I learned to call him—was not just the erudite thinker of his scholarly publications and the brilliant master of iambic pentameter in his epics, but also an unfailingly generous and kind confrère, willing to share ideas with and offer encouragement to this unknown stranger a thousand miles away. When Fred sent me a draft of his third epic, Apocalypse, in 2014 and invited me to make suggestions as he worked on final revisions before its publication, I had the temerity to advise him to write footnotes to the poem to assist readers with some of the more abstruse concepts and terminology in the poem. For most contemporary poets and critics of poetry, footnoting is as anathema as rhyme or traditional metrical forms in poems. To my surprise, the published text of Apocalypse included a discreet set of endnotes of the very kind I had suggested.
While he was a fierce defender of his poetic practices and aesthetic principles, Fred was so humble and unassuming that I often felt both charmed and chastened by his graciousness. In the final communication I had from him, in July of this year, he reacted to a draft of my chapter on “Epic and Science Fiction” for Jo Ann Cavallo’s forthcoming Routledge Companion to World Epics: “The Epic/SF essay makes exactly the right bridge–I blush to have my work be one of the girders! Being with [Olaf] Stapledon, [Kim Stanley] Robinson, [Cixin] Liu and [Arthur C.] Clarke in the same text is an honor.” At the time, I had not yet read what he called his “mini-epic,” titled “Return”—an as-yet-unpublished Wordsworthian poem in nine parts and three thousand lines about the various “Freds” who emerged over the course of his life. In the days after learning of his death, I read this testament that traces his development as a writer and thinker and sums up his life’s work. And in one tersely-worded couplet, Fred articulated what I had labored to say in my entire essay about epics and the future: “The genre then was science fiction epic / (All epic truly SF, SF epic).”
Fred did not want his mini-epic to be thought of as an autobiography but as “a voyage / Of discovery, to find the secret source / whereby all language irrigates the world.” He loved language for its endless possibilities: how it could be played with, how it could be made into music, how it could dignify human longing and aspiration, how it could change the way people think, how it could embody and rejoice in beauty, and how it could create something from nothing. Nemo, the poet-narrator of Apocalypse, defined his work in this way: “The task of epic is to blaze new trails, / Mark territories so that others may / Explore and map them.” Or as Fred put it in “Return,” “For words have got a most miraculous gift, / To summon all the world to their command.” Fred Turner’s life and work were multifaceted and not easily summarized, but for those of us who care about epics and the future of epic, The New World, Genesis, and Apocalypse stand as hallmarks of the art of poetry—miraculous gifts that are cause for endless celebration.
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The image featured above is taken from the cover of Frederick Turner’s Latter Days (2022), published by the Catholic University of America Press. “Latter Days tells a story about the meaning of a human life in the strange new world that is emerging today.”
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