Bard Bard In medieval Gaelic and British culture, a bard was a professional story teller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian and genealogist, employed by a patron (such as a monarch or noble), to commemorate one or more of the patron's ancestors and to praise the patron's own activities. Originally a specific, lower class of poet, contrasting with the higher rank known as "fili" in Ireland and Highland Scotland, with the decline of living bardic tradition in the modern period the term "bard" acquired generic meanings of an author or minstrel, especially a famous one. For example, William Shakespeare, and Rabindranath Tagore,
The Bard (poem) Edmund Gosse noted, "The Bard" "for at least a century remained almost without a rival among poems cherished by strictly poetical persons for the qualities of sublimity and pomp of vision." The publication of "The Bard" started a new chapter in the history of English poetry. It might be called the first primitivist poem in the English language, and certainly its success inspired a new generation of writers to turn their attention to Welsh and Gaelic themes from the distant past in a movement which came to be known as the Celtic Revival. One of the first to be so