The Poet and the Bard - Thoughts on Originality and Memory

John Ruskin the aesthete is known for his sensitive insights concerning art, society and architecture. One of his major contributions to architectural theory was his work on gothic beauty. Ruskin developed six principles he found needed to be present in gothic architecture in order for it to be Beautiful. The principles were Rudeness, Changefulness, Naturalness, Grotesqueness, Rigidity and Redundancy. To me, these principles, when one delves into them, can be applied to Beauty in general and offer a way of looking at art or architecture in general. The first one, Rudeness, applies I think to many forms of artistic endeavor. Rudeness, Ruskin said, is the introduction of Originality into a work of art at the expense of a polished, finished product.
Originality.
Classically, a Poet is one who creates something Original. He or she is the originator of something new, some new insight, some new revelation, but is Original. Dylan Thomas was original. T.S. Eliot, original. Blake, Yeats and Milton, all original. Though what they experienced was common, what they created was unique. Most importantly, they knew when to break the rules and be Rude.
A Bard.
A Bard, on the other hand was charged with remembering. He was one in a great line of preservationists whose job it was to remember a history, a myth, a moral story, that had been transmitted from bard to bard down through centuries. The bard may have used poetic devices such as meter and rhyme as a mnemonic device in order to help him recall what had been told him, but his aim was certainly not to be Original.
Poets lead colorful lives.
But bards, there are stories.
Toward the end of the bardic tradition, the transmission had shifted from the oral to the written. The bard wrote what he remembered. Libraries, monasteries, universities, throughout Europe were staffed with bards who remembered and wrote reams and reams and books and books and stuffed bookshelf after bookshelf with remembrances.
It is said that when a particularly powerful bard would pass away, books throughout his country, in libraries, monasteries, universities, would fall off the shelves.
So Originality, or Memory.....of which?