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 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.
As the victorious army of Edward I marches along the slopes of the Snowdonian mountains near to the river Conwy they encounter a Welsh bard, who curses the king. The bard invokes the shades of Cadwallo, Urien and Mordred, three of Edward's victims, [1] [2] who weave the fate of Edward's Plantagenet line, dwelling on the various miseries and misfortunes of his descendants. The bard goes on to predict the return of Welsh rule over Britain in the form of the house of Tudor, and the flowering of British poetry in the verse of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. Finally he tells Edward:
["]...with joy I see
The diff'rent dooms our fates assign.
Be thine despair, and scept'red care,
To triumph, and to die, are mine."
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night. [3]— lines 139-144
Gray was a keen student of medieval history, and in time came to make a particular study of the oldest Welsh poetry, though without actually learning the language. [4] [5] Several pages of his commonplace books are devoted to notes on Welsh prosody, and he also mentioned there a legend, now considered quite unhistorical, which he had come across in Thomas Carte's A General History of England (1747–1755). When Edward I conquered Wales, "he is said", wrote Gray, "to have hanged up all their Bards, because they encouraged the Nation to rebellion, but their works (we see), still remain, the Language (tho' decaying) still lives, and the art of their versification is known, and practised to this day among them". Gray also studied early Scandinavian literature, and found in one Old Norse poem the refrain "'Vindum vindum/ Vef Darradar'", which was to reappear in The Bard as "Weave the warp and weave the woof". In 1755 he began work on The Bard, and by August of that year had completed two thirds of the poem. Initially he worked with a speed and a sense of identification that were both unusual for him. "I felt myself the Bard", he declared. But composing the third and final strophe proved more difficult, and he eventually ground to a halt. [6] [7] [8] For two years the poem remained unfinished, but then in 1757 he attended a concert by John Parry, a blind harpist who claimed that the traditional Welsh harp repertoire went back as far as the druids. Gray was so inspired by this experience that he returned to The Bard with new enthusiasm, and was soon able to tell his friend William Mason, "Mr Parry, you must know, has set my Ode in motion again, and has brought it at last to a conclusion." [9] [10] Gray sold the copyright of this poem and of his "The Progress of Poesy" to the publisher Robert Dodsley for 40 guineas, and Dodsley issued them together under the title Odes by Mr. Gray. [11] The book was printed by Gray's friend Horace Walpole who had just set up a printing press at his home, Strawberry Hill, and who had set his heart on inaugurating the enterprise with Gray's poems. The Odes were published on 8 August 1757 as a handsome quarto, with a print run of 2000 copies priced at one shilling. [12] Walpole prevailed on Gray to add four footnotes to The Bard for the first edition, though Gray told Walpole, "I do not love notes…They are signs of weakness and obscurity. If a thing cannot be understood without them, it had better not be understood at all." These proved, for many readers, inadequate to explain the poem, and Gray complacently wrote to Mason "nobody understands me, and I am perfectly satisfied." Rather against his will, he was persuaded to add a few more notes for the 1768 edition. [13]
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. [14] 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. [15]
Dr. Johnson characteristically grumbled "I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political", and found much of the imagery ridiculous. [16] 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 . [17] Favourable, even enthusiastic, reviews appeared in the Critical Review , Monthly Review and Literary Magazine, and their voices were soon echoed by many others. [18] 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". [19] [20] 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". [21] 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." [22]
The publication of The Bard started a new chapter in the history of English poetry. It might be called the first primitivist poem in the English language, [23] [24] and certainly its success inspired a new generation of writers to turn their attention to Welsh and Gaelic themes from the distant past in a movement which came to be known as the Celtic Revival. One of the first to be so 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. [25] [26] [23] [27] Also indirectly inspired by The Bard were Walter Scott's hugely popular evocations of the Scottish past. [28] 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." [29] Its influence extended to Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, and as far as W. B. Yeats and the other Anglo-Irish writers of the Celtic Twilight. [30] In portraying Isabella of France as beautiful but manipulative or wicked, he combined Christopher Marlowe's depiction of Isabella with William Shakespeare's description of Margaret of Anjou (the wife of Henry VI) as the "She-Wolf of France", to qualify The Bard as anti-French, in which [she] rips apart the bowels of Edward II with her "unrelenting fangs." [31] The "She-Wolf" epithet stuck, and Bertolt Brecht re-used it in The Life of Edward II of England (1923). [31] 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". [32]
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Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician.
An ode is a type of lyric poetry, with its origins in Ancient Greece. Odes are elaborately structured poems praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also enter.
Thomas Gray was an English poet, letter-writer, and classical scholar at Cambridge University, being a fellow first of Peterhouse then of Pembroke College. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751.
In Celtic cultures, a bard is an oral repository and 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.
William Collins was an English poet. Second in influence only to Thomas Gray, he was an important poet of the middle decades of the 18th century. His lyrical odes mark a progression from the Augustan poetry of Alexander Pope's generation and towards the imaginative ideal of the Romantic era.
In Welsh culture, an eisteddfod is an institution and festival with several ranked competitions, including in poetry and music. The term eisteddfod, which is formed from the Welsh morphemes: eistedd, meaning 'sit', and fod, meaning 'be', means, according to Hywel Teifi Edwards, "sitting-together." Edwards further defines the earliest form of the eisteddfod as a competitive meeting between bards and minstrels, in which the winner was chosen by a noble or royal patron.
Edward Williams, better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, was a Welsh antiquarian, poet and collector. He was seen as an expert collector of Medieval Welsh literature, but it emerged after his death that he had forged several manuscripts, notably some of the Third Series of Welsh Triads. Even so, he had a lasting impact on Welsh culture, notably in founding the secret society known as the Gorsedd, through which Iolo Morganwg successfully co-opted the 18th-century Eisteddfod revival. The philosophy he spread in his forgeries has had an enormous impact upon neo-Druidism. His bardic name is Welsh for "Iolo of Glamorgan".
Il Penseroso is a poem by John Milton, first found in the 1645/1646 quarto of verses The Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, published by Humphrey Moseley. It was presented as a companion piece to L'Allegro, a vision of poetic mirth. The speaker of this reflective ode dispels "vain deluding Joys" from his mind in a ten-line prelude, before invoking "divinest Melancholy" to inspire his future verses. The melancholic mood is idealised by the speaker as a means by which to "attain / To something like prophetic strain," and for the central action of Il Penseroso – which, like L'Allegro, proceeds in couplets of iambic tetrameter – the speaker speculates about the poetic inspiration that would transpire if the imagined goddess of Melancholy he invokes were his Muse. The highly digressive style Milton employs in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso dually precludes any summary of the poems' dramatic action as it renders them interpretively ambiguous to critics. However, it can surely be said that the vision of poetic inspiration offered by the speaker of Il Penseroso is an allegorical exploration of a contemplative paradigm of poetic genre.
Pindarics was a term for a class of loose and irregular odes greatly in fashion in England during the close of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. Abraham Cowley, who published fifteen Pindarique Odes in 1656, was the poet most identified with the form though many others had composed irregular verses before him. The term is derived from the name of a Greek archaic poet, Pindar, but is based on a misconception since Pindar's odes were in fact very formal, obeying a triadic structure, in which the form of the first stanza (strophe) was repeated in the second stanza (antistrophe), followed by a third stanza (epode) that introduced variations but whose form was repeated by other epodes in subsequent triads. Cowley's Resurrection, which was considered in the 17th century to be a model of the 'pindaric' style, is a formless poem of sixty-four lines, arbitrarily divided, not into triads, but into four stanzas of unequal volume and structure; the lines which form these stanzas are of lengths varying from three feet to seven feet, with rhymes repeated in no order. It was the looseness of these 'pindarics' that appealed to many poets at the close of the 17th century, including John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Alexander Pope, and many lesser poets, such as John Oldham, Thomas Otway, Thomas Sprat, John Hughes and Thomas Flatman.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard, the poem was completed when Gray was living near the Church of St Giles, Stoke Poges. It was sent to his friend Horace Walpole, who popularised the poem among London literary circles. Gray was eventually forced to publish the work on 15 February 1751 in order to preempt a magazine publisher from printing an unlicensed copy of the poem.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Welsh-language literature has been produced continuously since the emergence of Welsh from Brythonic as a distinct language in around the 5th century AD. The earliest Welsh literature was poetry, which was extremely intricate in form from its earliest known examples, a tradition sustained today. Poetry was followed by the first British prose literature in the 11th century. Welsh-language literature has repeatedly played a major part in the self-assertion of Wales and its people. It continues to be held in the highest regard, as evidenced by the size and enthusiasm of the audiences attending the annual National Eisteddfod of Wales, probably the largest amateur arts festival in Europe, which crowns the literary prize winners in a dignified ceremony.
The British Poet Laureate is an honorary position appointed by the monarch of the United Kingdom on the advice of the prime minister. The role does not entail any specific duties, but there is an expectation that the holder will write verse for significant national occasions. The laureateship dates to 1616 when a pension was provided to Ben Jonson, but the first official Laureate was John Dryden, appointed in 1668 by Charles II. On the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who held the post between November 1850 and October 1892, there was a break of four years as a mark of respect; Tennyson's laureate poems "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were particularly cherished by the Victorian public. Four poets, Thomas Gray, Samuel Rogers, Walter Scott and Philip Larkin turned down the laureateship. Historically appointed for an unfixed term and typically held for life, since 1999 the term has been ten years. The holder of the position as at 2024 is Simon Armitage who succeeded Carol Ann Duffy in May 2019 after 10 years in office.
"Monody on the Death of Chatterton" was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1790 and was rewritten throughout his lifetime. The poem deals with the idea of Thomas Chatterton, a poet who committed suicide, as representing the poetic struggle.
Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, was an English landowner, biographer and historian. He bequeathed his family seat, Felbrigg Hall, to the National Trust.
The Voice of the Ancient Bard is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Innocence in 1789, but later moved to Songs of Experience, the second part of the larger collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794.
Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm is an oil painting on canvas by English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1832. Etty had been planning the painting since 1818–19, and an early version was exhibited in 1822. The piece was inspired by a metaphor in Thomas Gray's poem The Bard in which the apparently bright start to the notorious misrule of Richard II of England was compared to a gilded ship whose occupants are unaware of an approaching storm. Etty chose to illustrate Gray's lines literally, depicting a golden boat filled with and surrounded by nude and near-nude figures.
Anne Penny was a British poet and translator, born in Wales to a vicar and his wife. She married a privateer who owned an estate in Oxford, but was left widowed at the age of 22 with a son, Hugh Cloberry Christian. She then started writing poetry. She married a French customs officer, again with a maritime history, and the couple moved to London. There she published a number of works, including her most significant poem An Invocation to the Genius of Britain, a patriotic piece written at the start of the Anglo-French War. She also published a number of translations of Welsh poems.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement in England, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, about 1820.
Samuel Berdmore D.D. was an English cleric, schoolmaster, and author, master of Charterhouse School from 1769.
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