page_title: Bard
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Bard / Literature
caption_attribution_description: English: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Y, 1825, object 54, The Voice of the Ancient Bard (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
context_page_description: In Celtic cultures, a bard was a professional story teller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian and genealogist, employed by a patron to commemorate one or more of the patron's ancestors and to praise the patron's own activities.
  Originally bards were a specific lower class of poet, contrasting with the higher rank known as fili in Ireland and Highland Scotland,
  With the decline of a living bardic tradition in the modern period, the term has loosened to mean a generic minstrel or author. For example, William Shakespeare and Rabindranath Tagore are respectively known as "the Bard of Avon" and "the Bard of Bengal".
context_section_description: From its frequent use in Romanticism, 'The Bard' became attached as a title to various  poets,
  'The Bard of Armagh' is Martin Hearty
  'The Bard of Avon,' 'The Immortal Bard' or (in England) simply 'The Bard' is William Shakespeare
  'The Bard of Ayrshire' (or in Scotland, simply 'The Bard') is Robert Burns
  'The Bard of Bengal' is Rabindranath Tagore
  'The Bard of Olney' is William Cowper
  'The Bard of Rydal Mount' is William Wordsworth
  'The Bard of Salford' is John Cooper Clarke
  'The Bard of Twickenham' is Alexander Pope
  Australian bush poets such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson are referred to as 'bush bards'
  Bob Dylan, Jim MacCool and the band Blind Guardian have also been termed 'bards'
caption: William Blake's hand painted engraving of his poem "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience
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