The New World
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About this ebook
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.
Read more from Frederick W. Turner
Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets
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At Lake Scugog: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Erosion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Carnations: Poems Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The Eternal City: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Two Yvonnes: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSyllabus of Errors: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Glossary of Chickens: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Almanac: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5First Nights: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHybrids of Plants and of Ghosts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scaffolding: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ruined Elegance: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Radioactive Starlings: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe River Twice: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBefore Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Unstill Ones: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Woman Under the Surface: Poems and Prose Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlyover Country: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Explanation of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hosts and Guests: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Stet: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Before Recollection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rain in Plural: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Yellow Stars and Ice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The New World: Infinitesimal Epics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Reviews for The New World
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- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Turner set a grand goal for himself in The New World: An Epic Poem -- in his words, "to demonstrate that a viable human future, a possible history, however imperfect, does lie beyond our present horizon of apparent cultural exhaustion and nuclear holocaust."It's a curious world he conjures for a time 400 years in the future (what he deems the epic interval -- though a leap into the future rather than a look at the past as in traditional epic poems). His world seems to be an amalgam of post-fossil fuel high-tech, medieval warfare, 19th-century farming life, 20th-century commerce, ancient religion with its blood sacrifices, and Celtic pirates. It's an insular American future, focused specifically on the Northeast -- what is now New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The society is divided into 4 major groups. The Riots, supposedly violent matriarchies driven by psychedelic drugs have enslaved the Burbs, descendants of the suburban middle class (though the existence of these societies is merely asserted, never illustrated). The Mad Counties are religious fundamentalists who practice a kind of 17th c. Protestantism and follow a Cromwellian militancy in their own religious jihad. And the Free Counties embrace a kind of Jeffersonian agrarianism coupled with a class society based on the Vedic caste system. The Kashitrya are the political leaders and warriors, the Brahmins the priests, the Vaisyas the princes of commerce, and the Shudra the farmers. Any citizen in the Free Counties may declare a change in his caste/bur rarely will do so after his thirtieth year,/it being hard to adapt to a new code of manners,/values and skills."The narrative focuses on the attempt of a Mad Counties alliance to defeat the Free Counties and subject them to their brand of religious fundamentalism. The Mad Counties alliance is led by a Mordred-like traitor from the Free Counties. The tale is rather a wild ride with some provocative philosophical digressions, but I think it really gets mired in its own pretensions. The characters are stereotypes at best and the action is pretty cliched. The poetry doesn't sing, except when Turner turns to nature metaphors:But as a spider, whose web lies in the pathof an officious housemaid's duster, though starved and frail,remakes every day a web whose beauty and symmetrydiminish each time and decay; till at last a fewtattered and ghastly strands, anchored in a knot,a hideous shred, hang from the beam: still,drawing out of herself the torn silk of her existencethe simmer yet renew her work of weaving; or as the tree whose first buds were brokenin March by a frost, and fall, cased in a jewelof ice, and whose second budding, still a brave show, is stricken and snapped by hard winds in April,nevertheless will put forth a third, stunted and sickly vesture, easy prey for the beetles and flies that riot in carnival May; so James lifts up his head once more.... Perhaps, Turner should have stuck to the "free verse existentialist imagist lyric poem" that he dismisses as irrelevant in the introduction to his poem.