He is the author of three full-length science fiction epic poems, The New World, Genesis and Apocalypse; several books of his poetry and literary translations; and a number of other works.

In an interview with William Baer, Turner recalled, "In fact, my father wanted to be a poet", but chose to be an anthropologist to provide for his family.

"[3] In 1952, Turner's father accepted an assignment funded by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute to study the Eastern Ndembu people of Northern Rhodesia.

They were wonderful, with a smoky hay kind of smell... We would truck in supplies occasionally, and there was a small trading center called Mwinilunga, which had a few stores.

Turner's other examiners were Lord David Cecil and John Bayley, the husband of novelist Iris Murdoch.

[9] 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.

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.

Turner has, according to William Baer, "written numerous love poems," addressed to his wife, such as The Mei Lin Effect.

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.

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.

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.

"[12] 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.

The argument for this position was first set forth in the aptly titled Natural Classicism (1986)..."[13] 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.

[14] Meanwhile, Turner and psychologist and neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, West Germany, made the scientific breakthrough by proving, according to William Baer, "that regular rhythm actually induces the brain to release pleasure-creating endorphins.

"[16] 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.

[19] 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.

"[21] Also according to Wilson, "Entire segments of the American population, dubbed 'Riots', now live as 'liberated' crazed addicts of drugs and violence, others lose themselves in a fundamentalist Christian Jihad.

Like Homer's Odyssey, Turner's epic tells, "of a man who must struggle to return home and claim his family from his enemies".

Like Njal's Saga, The New World tells of, "a tragic family feud", and, like Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal, "it is not the hero's prowess, but his questions that enable him to find the Grail."

From the Bhagavad Gita, Turner drew the plotline in which, "a hero weary of war is able to reconcile his duty with his knowledge".

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.

[25] 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.

"[26] Turner's second epic is the 1990 poem Genesis, which is heavily influenced by Greek Mythology and is about the human colonization of Mars.

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.