Hayley, William

William Hayley (1745–1820) was a successful poet and biographer, whose most enduring work,The Triumphs of Temper(1781), was considered by many contemporaries to be an exemplum of moral purpose and poetic form. Composed in heroic couplets, the six‐canto poem was designed to improve polite society by instructing adolescence girls how to exercise temper to regulate the socially damaging effects of spleen. Chiefly remembered for his friendships with various authors and artists including Anna Seward, George Romney, Joseph Wright, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Amelia Opie, and for his patronage of William Blake, Hayley's literary influence has been overshadowed by various derogatory remarks about his poetry, such as Robert Southey's comment that ‘Everything about that man is good except his poetry’ (Southey 1856, vol. 1: 156). In addition, Hayley's reputation has suffered at the hands of Blake's biographers and critics. Armed with Blake's correspondence from early 1803, which charts his increasing unhappiness at undertaking commercial engraving work for Hayley, and a series of satiric epigrams dated circa 1809, Blake scholars typically cast Hayley's patronage as creatively benumbing and Hayley as an unimaginative and tedious man. Hayley's contemporaries, however, did not see him this way. On the contrary, he was considered the poetical successor to Alexander Pope, and his literary productions, which encompass plays, poetry, at least one novel, didactic prose tracts, the first English translations of Dante and Ercilla, and numerous biographies, proved extremely popular with late eighteenth‐century readers. Indeed, while dismissive of his poetry, Southey also observed that ‘[Hayley was] the most fashionable of living poets [who] would, in no inconsiderable degree, excite the attention of what is called the reading public’ (Southey 1825: 263).