Frederick Turner, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, was educated at Oxford University and taught at U.C. Santa Barbara and Kenyon College.  A poet, critic, and former editor of The Kenyon Review, his books include Genesis: an Epic Poem ; Natural Classicism; Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti (translations, with Zsuzsanna Ozsvath); The Culture of Hope; Hadean Eclogues; and Shakespeare's Twenty-first Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money.

The relationship between the individual artist and the society in which he or she lives and the traditions he or she represents is a question as old as art itself. Frederick Turner, a poet, philosopher, teacher and translator, represents a tradition that is mindful of its roots in the classics as it pushes itself forward.

In recent years, a movement in the arts has risen up known as the "Derriere Guard." This movement is composed of a group of like minded artists, musicians, architects and writers who seek to move their respective arts forward from the principles of Modernism by reconnecting with the values and forms of the past. Frederick Turner is a part of this movement. As a poet, he has brought the form of the epic into modern poetry by dealing with contemporary concerns and conventions. As a scholar, he has written about Shakespeare and the classics in the context of the modern world. As a philosopher, he has returned his discourse to a discussion of beauty in the context of the contemporary world.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Turner about his work. We spoke of his poetry, his work as a translator and his ideas. But, first, there was a story about the moment all those years ago when he realized he was a poet.

"There is a kind of story about that," says Mr. Turner. "I think with most things like that, one gradually drifts into something. But in my case, somehow I probably did drift into [writing poetry] and this story is a kind of threshold crossing in what was a gradual process.

"This was in Central Africa when my parents were doing their anthropological field work. Very often we would travel in our beat up truck on dirt roads as a family. But one time, my father decided to take just me on a four hundred mile drive back to civilization, to the copper belt because we needed to get supplies. There wouldn't have been room if the family had come and there were other reasons. I think my mother had to stay behind because she'd turned into a kind of local doctor. My sister was kind of small and it might have been a tough journey for her. So it was just me and my father. And we were driving though the savannah and occasional jungles, pulling into little African villages, greeting the people there and staying at night in guest houses and making at most a hundred-fifty miles a day.

"But there was one moment where, because I'd had a long time to sit beside my father and look at the trees going by that I started, sort of, to introspect. I must have been nine years old. And it seemed more and more miraculous to me that I should have this personal consciousness. And I wondered if anybody else had ever noticed it," he said, laughing.

"It's that fantastic arrogance of the very young. I thought, 'my gosh, I'm really going to have to tell everybody about this! I'm aware of myself! What a great discovery!'

"But that was also combined with a simultaneous sense of the miracle of nature, [how it] was so fabulously ordered down to the last detail. All the leaves had been custom made, as it were.

"So those two things came together at the point. I knew that I had to somehow tell stories to people. Later I found out that other people had sort of noticed that they had personal consciousnesses as well, but by that time I was kind of stuck. But the sense of miracle remained all along."

This story goes a long way to explain how the young Frederick Turner became aware of the world around him. But the basic question, the one that is central to all writers is "Why do I write?"

"There's the old answer, which is partly true, that one writes in order to find out what one thinks," says Mr. Turner to that question. "It's as if for me there's a sort of total model of the world, so to speak, which is dynamic, is continually growing and is always checking itself out against the experience of the species that [comes] through science, literature, art and so on. There's this vast, interconnected kind of pattern of ideas that corresponds more or less, I hope, to the actual universe.

"It's like a magpie. I've just collected all the brightest and shiniest ideas I've been able to find anywhere and drag them back to my nest. But its also that I feel a kind of responsibility to where I got them from. And that I want to arrange them in my nest in such a way that they make a sort of system that behaves in the way the whole of the rest of the world does.

"But those ideas are almost always from other people or from nature itself, from science or just wonderful inventions of other people. But the way its all put together in my own sort of 'glue,' I think, is unique to me as I think it is to everybody. What I've just described is really a cognative or philosophical process. That describes me to some extent as a philosopher. If one could imagine, if you like, an aesthetic, as opposed to a cognative, or veritical version of that, then that's what I am as a poet. In a way, I'm making a vast poem through all the things that I've ever written that, I hope, corresponds to the world, but that corresponds to the world the way a husband corresponds to a wife or a wife corresponds to a husband, that they be in love with each other and there would be a conjugal relationship between them."

Mr. Turner's work directly reflects both his philosophical and poetic sides. A clear example of this can be seen in two of his books, Beauty: The Value of Values and April Wind. The former is a philosophical work on the nature of beauty. The latter is a collection of poems on the same theme. When read side by side, one can see two very different aspects of the same idea. Beauty: The Value of Values is an essay on beauty. April Wind is an enactment of the ideas expressed in the essay.

"Since it is art, [poetry] is always going to be a challenge to any discursive expression of ideas," said Mr. Turner on the relationship between those two works.

"What it does then is that it holds the feet, so to speak, of the idea to the fire. Because if the ideas are too rigid to survive the wonderful protean generativeness of art, then those ideas are probably wrong. It becomes a sort of test of the ideas."

But the very disparate natures of poetry and philosophy can, in my view, contradict one another. Some poems can have a powerful effect on and meaning to the reader but resist analysis in any sort of logical framework.

"I have my own collection of poems, as it were, of whom I would say the same," said Mr. Turner on this contradiction. "For me, the very greatest poems are the ones that [express ideas, like those of] Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, Dante, Goethe and so on. [Their works] have an elegant and intricate logical structure and at the same time have depth below depth, a sort of dynamic self-transformation, a richer implication and meaning and connotation. For me, in a sense, its not that I insist that poems be rational, but that rationality is one marvelous tool that a poet has at his or her disposal. It's just one tool of many. But it's one which particularly extends itself to the reader. And this is where it comes back to communication because that's something that the reader can share [with me, the poet]. The reader can think it out for him or herself and get to the same place that I've got to when I ran across the chasm or the shock that is the occasion of the poem. In fact metrical form and that kind of thing has the same function in some ways. It leads the reader up to the point where things become deeply, deeply mysterious."

I was taught many years ago that poetry can be thought of as a kind of music. Perhaps the mystery that Mr. Turner refers to comes from the same well of experience as the mystery of music.

"Yes. I agree," said Mr. Turner. "Yes, I think there's some place in all the arts where there is a kind of inner spirit that I call Beauty that is common to all."

It is clear that Mr. Turner is at home in many literary forms. But does he consider himself first and foremost a poet?

"Yes. But I do have a notion of the kind of poet I want to be that comes from people like Shakespeare, Milton, Dante and Goethe. Chaucer wrote a treatise on the astrolabe. Dante wrote some pretty interesting political philosophy in the Vita Nuova and Milton was one of the great intellectuals behind the English civil war and I think, in some ways, the origins of America. Shakespeare was a genius in a whole range of fields. I'd rather be a third rater in that company than a first rater in the company of smaller poets of elegant sensibility. But what that requires is a kind of continuous curiosity and enthusiasm about everything that's going on in the culture and in the sciences and in the disciplines and the crafts and technologies and so on. Because that's what [the great poets] had."

Perhaps this interest in other disciplines and the interweaving of those disciplines into an art form is the result of every day experience. As a writer, Mr. Turner places great emphasis on forming an idea and acting upon it.

"Or having an action and making sense of it," Mr. Turner continued. "In a way I would say my poetry has led my prose rather than my prose leading my poetry. That is, I write a lot of my prose as a way of trying to explain in a more discursive way the stuff that I discovered in the process of writing poetry. I find that in a strange kind of way, the fictions, the poetic fictions that I write are more true and honest to what I really am [than my essays.]"

In addition to his essays and poetry, Mr. Turner has also translated the works of other poets, notably those of Attila Jozef and Miklos Radnoti. Both of these poets wrote in their native Hungarian, a language that is far different from English and other European languages. On these projects, Mr. Turner worked with a native Hungarian speaker, Zsuzsana Ozsvath, who tranliterated the Hungarian poems into English, enabling him to form them into metrical patterns emulating those of the Hungarian originals.

"What we tried to do is reproduce as exactly as possible the strictly metrical features of the original. In other words, [we preserved in English] nearly all the time the same rhyme scheme, the same number of syllables per line, the same metrical foot. But Hungarian is a peculiar kind of language and the foot doesn't quite translate from Hungarian into English. But I've developed a system using the English foot, loosening it up in such a way as to reflect the somewhat less stressed nature of Hungarian. Another way of putting it is that English is iambic and Hungarian is dactylic. But its a deeper sort of difference than that. Again, perhaps with the musical analogy, [it is akin to] transposing a piece written for one instrument into another instrument or an orchestra or chamber group.

"I have [also] translated a number of the French symbolists. I've never bothered to publish them. I've translated some German poetry, a little bit of Goethe [and others], At the moment I'm translating Chinese T'ang poetry and we're going to do an anthology. I'm translating with a wonderful Chinese scholar, Yongzhao Deng. A very different kind of person from Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, who is my Hungarian collaborator. But the same kind of passionate love of the poetry and the same kind of amazing capacity to have memorized a very great deal of the poetry. Zsuzie knows most of the Hungarian poets by heart and Yongzhao knows most of the Chinese poems. In some strange sort of way, that enables us to communicate. We do a lot of the work orally and that enables us to communicate in a way so that I can get into the mind of the original poet."

Translating the work of another poet can allow one to become close to the individual artist. In some way, immersing one's self in the language of another culture can teach one about tradition, both in and out of one's own experience. Literary tradition is a central issue in Mr. Turner's work. As a contemporary poet, he writes in and about the contemporary world. But he is clearly connected to literary traditions of the past. To what extent does he, or any artist, see himself or herself as part of a tradition?

"It's T.S. Eliot's old question about tradition and the individual talent, isn't it?" answered Mr. Turner. "And it's still a live one. For me, I have absolutely no qualms about being a part of a tradition. But the way I see the past is very different, I think, from the modernist model of what a past is like. Let me try to put it in terms of an aphorism I use sometimes. There are some periods in which the present creates the future by breaking the shackles of the past. But there are other periods where the past creates the future by breaking the shackles of the present. What I mean by that is that I think the present can be a kind of deadly glaze that covers everything like a kind of polyurethane plastic that prevents anything from touching or smelling or resonating with anything else. Our present fashions are the things that we think with, they're the things which we're absolutely embedded in and that constitute our sort of pride in our power and our competence. But the past is something which is, precisely because it's dead, it's gone, it's not here, it's dark, it's mysterious, it's what's under the ground. It's new. It strangely and terribly new. What we know is above the ground. Almost anywhere on this planet if you start digging down you get into geological layers, into fossils, into mysterious stuff that you'd never known before.

"In other words, for me there are two fresh sources for something that is very new and that will crack that glaze, or varnish of accustomedness. One of them is science because science shows us things we've never seen before. The other is the past because the past is something which we've covered over with the constructions of the present. So those are the things that can renew and refresh one's experience so that one actually has an immediate contact with reality. There's a further element to this and that is, as it were, the classic. For me, the classic is essentially whatever truly unfinished business the world has. I mentioned the old chestnuts, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Homer, Virgil and so on. They are the exploratory journeys that have not yet been completed."

Perhaps another element of what is classic in world literature is the part of it that speaks to the fundamental experience of people throughout the ages. World folklore survives from one generation to the next precisely because it speaks to the common experiences, fears and aspirations of all people.

"Exactly," said Mr. Turner. "And fundamental precisely in that human nature is itself problematic and paradoxical. Human nature isn't a state. Its a kind of struggle, I think. Which means that the great expressions of human fundamentals are always disturbing, troubling, dangerous, exciting and open ended because that's the way human beings are.

"And, in a way, they're the continuing scandals. One of the interesting byproducts, I think, about post-structuralist critiques of traditional works of literature, the Bible, Shakespeare and so on, was that those enterprises were intended in some way to delegitimize them, to overthrow their authority. But [the post-structuralist critiques] pointed out how deeply scandalous those works are, how they say the stuff we're all too polite to say. To put it in psychoanalytic terms, they are the dreams that are the royal road to the unconscious, the unacknowledged psychological material that we've still got propelling us as a species."

If one looks at modern literary works as "the royal road to the unconscious," one can see why Mr. Turner has made some of the literary choices he had in his own work. He has written two epic poems, Genesis and The New World. While they harken back to an old tradition of telling stories in verse with themes of heroism and tragedy, they reflect a modern sensibility in their use of the conventions of science fiction.

"I've been reading science fiction from way back," says Mr. Turner on both his current reading and those works that have influenced his own writing. "I love science fiction. It's really the equivalent of popular folk myth. The stories of the gods and the nymphs and the heroes that were floating around in Greece with all their peculiar bits of magic, their counterfactual situations and their extreme oddity were ways of doing a certain kind of cultural thinking. I think that science fiction, and probably some genres like the comic book, do that for our culture. And I think it's immensely important. I think science fiction has some of the same function as dreams, that is, a way of reorganizing past information in a new and original way and a way, I think, of anticipating the future. Or anticipating futures, deciding among them before we actually break our nose on them. They are a way of entering without too much danger, moral worlds that we may one day encounter. It's just as well that we do it fictionally rather than blunder into it.

"One of the nice things about science fiction is that it goes on, its a vital genre, it continues to produce some really interesting stuff. But, obviously there are the great classics, like Heinlein, Wells and Jules Verne. And I love Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alfred Bester, Frank Herbert, Arthur Clarke. Right now, there are two groups of science fiction writers that I really love. One of them is Cyberpunk. I really like William Gibson. He's really one of the most elegant stylists writing in English, an immensely sophisticated cultural critic or cultural analyst. More of an anthropologist than a critic. And somewhat more robust, Bruce Sterling, then for the really way out, I like Neal Stevenson. Really cool stuff, so to speak. And I've liked Greg Bear for years, and Gregory Benford.

"The other class of science fiction writer that I like are the women. There are some wonderful women writers. Lois McMaster Bujold. There's a new one I like, Catherine Asaro, who writes romance novels that are science fiction but they're so vivid and they have a wonderful native imaginative energy. They remind me a bit of Edgar Rice Burroughs. So I'm enjoying reading the women writers now."

In addition to his poetry, criticism, philosophical works and translations, Mr. Turner serves as the Founders Professor of the Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. In that capacity, he teaches a number of courses, some of which mirror the themes of his writing.

"I have a couple of fairly ordinary courses, although I don't teach them in an entirely ordinary way. I have a Shakespeare course, or rather two, one graduate and one undergraduate. I almost always have some sort of performance in it. In other words, a lot of the close analysis of the text is in order to work on really original kinds of performance and to do this in a "workshoppy" way so that its always spontaneous and exciting. It's not like we want to produce a polished production. Its rather that the plays become texts for certain kinds of rituals that we are performing, as a group of people.

"And then I teach a course on poetry, both reading and writing. We read a lot of poetry. I undertake to teach everybody how to write meter and to do it elegantly so that its not forced. Actually, its easier to acquire that than people think.

"If you're going to be a poet, you ought to have a conception of what the universe is like and you ought to have a conception of what the role of the poet in the universe is. And so I sort propose my own and challenge [my students] to produce theirs. In other words, I'm saying 'a lot of you will have a kind of native verbal talent and will have feelings that you're in touch with and that's a great start.' T.S. Eliot and others have said that somebody like that has one good book in them in which they've used up all their youthful material.

"I think [they should develop] a sense of science, history, philosophy and so on, or they're going to be doomed to self plagiarism for the rest of their lives. Because they're simply going over the same material. And so what I want them to do is to develop a sturdy universe around them, something like what we were talking about at the very beginning of our conversation. So that's what I do [when I teach] poetry.

"But I also have a course on the nature of beauty. Much like the kind of approach that you find in Beauty: The Value of Values. I had a course for a while on hope, that was more a kind of cultural criticism course. I have a course on the nature of time which is my most fundamental scientific cum philosophical interest. I have a course on the literature of the martial arts in which I actually teach a beginning karate class as part of the literature class. When Hamlet says 'I have been in constant practice' since Laertes went into France, they know what that means. Or we read Sun Tzu, they know what that means. We read some of the martial arts classics and they have a sense of what it means. We also read some of the great Western classics, The Odyssey and Hamlet and so on, in the light of what it's like to change your body and move and sweat and be in the situation where in theory you could get hit by somebody else and you could hit somebody else. And I think that gives a profoundly different sort of experience of that huge swathe of literature that concerns action and martial virtues of one kind or another. But it's also a critique of those, too."

At the beginning of our conversation, Mr. Turner said that "one writes to find out what one thinks." Perhaps that can be said of all writers. But that is only one reason of many. The works of Frederick Turner and other writers like him show that the reasons for writing are as variant as there are human beings in the world. And the concerns of any writer are the concerns of all people who live in and think about the world around them.