"A Man of Talent"
by Robert Silverberg
Form: Short story
Year: 1956
ID: 717
Publication history:
- 1966: New Dreams This Morning, Ballantine Mass market paperback
- 1971: Moonferns and Starsongs, Ballantine Mass market paperback, ISBN 345-02278-5, 244 pp.
- 1979: The Songs of Summer, Gollancz Hard cover book, ISBN 0575025654, 173 pp.
- 1981: The Songs of Summer, Pan Mass market paperback, ISBN 0330263153
- 1982: Les Chants de l'été, J'ai lu Mass market paperback, ISBN 2277213926, 245 pp., in French as Le dernier pote
- 1996: The Road to Nightfall (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume 4), HarperCollins UK Trade paperback, ISBN 0-586-21372-4, 347 pp.
- 2002: Le Chemin de la nuit: Nouvelles au fil du temps, tome 1, 1953-1970, Flammarion Trade paperback, ISBN 2080682350, 727 pp., in French as Un homme de talent
Other resources:
[None on record]
Comments:
A reworking of . Emil Vilar is the last truly talented poet on Earth, but he lives in a society where real poetry, the kind written by the likes of Yeats or Pound, is not valued. So he decides to go somewhere else—the colony world of Rigel Seven, settled centuries ago by sixteen families. Surely they would appreciate a true poet. But when he gets there, he finds that everyone is a poet. And a musician. And a painter. The arts are cultivated in all people, and a mere poet seems pitifully under-cultured.