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) influenced was the Scot James Macpherson, whose prose poems issued under the name of the ancient bard Ossian achieved extraordinary popularity, spreading the Celtic glamour across Europe and America. Also indirectly inspired by "The Bard" were Walter Scott's hugely popular evocations of the Scottish past. "The Bard", in fact, was a precursor of Romanticism, or as the critic William Powell Jones put it, Gray "started a flame…when he wrote "The Bard", and the fire swept into the Romantic movement itself." Its influence extended to Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, and as far as W. B. Yeats and the other Anglo-Irish writers