Bard are known as "the Bard of Avon" (often simply "the Bard") and "the Bard of Bengal" respectively. The word is a Celtic loan word from Scottish Gaelic "bàrd", Irish "bard", Welsh "bardd". In 16th-century Scotland, it was a derogatory term for an itinerant musician; nonetheless it was later romanticised by Sir Walter Scott. In medieval Gaelic and Welsh society, a "bard" (Scottish and Irish Gaelic) or "bardd" (Welsh) was a professional poet, employed to compose eulogies for his lord (see planxty). If the employer failed to pay the proper amount, the bard would then compose a satire (c.f. "fili", "fáith").
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