The Bard (poem) The Bard (poem) The Bard. A Pindaric Ode (1757) is a poem by Thomas Gray, set at the time of Edward I's conquest of Wales. Inspired partly by his researches into medieval history and literature, partly by his discovery of Welsh harp music, it was itself a potent influence on future generations of poets and painters, seen by many as the first creative work of the Celtic Revival and as lying at the root of the Romantic movement in Britain. As the victorious army of Edward I marches along the slopes of the Snowdonian mountains near to the river Conwy
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