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) called "The Bard" and "The Progress of Poesy" the best odes in the language; David Garrick thought them the best in any language; Thomas James Mathias compared "The Bard" favourably to Pindar, Horace, Dante and Petrarch; and by 1807 even Percival Stockdale had changed his mind, and could write of its "poetical excellence". One exception to this trend was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1799 wrote that ""The Bard" once intoxicated me, & now I read it without pleasure", and more than thirty years later could still remark that he found it "frigid and artificial". On the whole, however, as