The Bard (poem) of the Celtic Twilight. One measure of the poem's place in the culture of the English-speaking world lies in the academic James MacKillop's claim that "The current standard English definition of this Celtic word ["bard"], denoting a poet of exalted status, i.e. the voice of a nation or people, dates from Thomas Gray's use of it in his 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
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