page_title: The Bard (poem)
section_title: Critical reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Bard (poem) / Critical reception
context_page_description: The Bard. A Pindaric Ode 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.
context_section_description: In the general state of ignorance of Welsh culture that prevailed in English literary circles in 1757 The Bard formed something of a challenge to Gray's readers.  He claimed that "all people of condition are agreed not to admire, nor even to understand" the Odes.  In 1778 the political writer Percival Stockdale was one such negative voice:
  If the subject of a Poem is obscure, or not generally known, or not interesting, and if it abounds with allusions, and facts of this improper, and uninteresting character, the writer who chuses the subject, and introduces those improper, and unaffecting allusions, and facts, betrays a great want of poetical judgment, and taste. Mr. Gray had a vitiated fondness for such insipid fable, narrative, and references.
  Dr. Johnson characteristically grumbled "I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political", and found much of the imagery ridiculous.  But from the very beginning Gray's complaint of universal misunderstanding was mistaken.  In December 1757, only four months after The Bard was published, Gray was offered the Poet Laureateship .  Favourable, even enthusiastic, reviews appeared in the Critical Review, Monthly Review and Literary Magazine, and their voices were soon echoed by many others.  John Brown, a then fashionable social commentator, reportedly 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 Edmund Gosse noted, The Bard "for at least a century remained almost without a rival among poems cherished by strictly poetical persons for the qualities of sublimity and pomp of vision."
caption: William Etty, Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm, 1832
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