William Hayley was a poet, biographer, man of letters, and cultivator of influential literary and artistic networks during the final decades of the eighteenth century. Considered one of the brightest stars in the poetical firmament, Hayley is now chiefly remembered for his patronage of William Blake, and his friendships with George Romney and William Cowper. As a poet, Hayley’s importance during his own lifetime has been overshadowed by various disparaging remarks about his poetry: his literary star began to wane after the publication of The Triumphs of Music in 1804, which the Poetical Register described as a “most feeble production.” In English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, Byron echoes the Political Register in his assessment of Hayley’s poetry as “For ever feeble and for ever tame.” As poetic fashions shifted at the turn of the nineteenth century, public taste for poetry like Hayley’s diminished and his reputation suffered. In his 1824 review of Hayley’s posthumous Memoirs, Southey characterizes his poetry as displaying a “constitutional feebleness”: he had written to Byron on 4 August 1802 arguing that “Everything about that man is good except his poetry”. In 1830, George Romney’s son John attacked Hayley’s character rather than his poetry, accusing him of deceit, selfishness, and flattery, further claiming that “there was a wrong-headedness in the general conduct of Mr Hayley”. An 1837 review of The Triumphs of Temper conflates these strands of criticism to describe the poem as “dull, tedious and prosaic”, adding that, “the mind of Hayley was not of a high order; and it is therefore scarcely to be wondered at that he became a spoiled and pampered man—spoiled by the world, which so vastly overrated his powers”. As Jason Whittaker and Annise Rogers explore in Chap. 2 , Hayley’s reputation has also suffered at the hands of Blake’s biographers and critics. Armed with Blake’s correspondence from 1802 onwards, which charts his increasing dissatisfaction with the reproductive engraving work for Hayley, and a series of satiric epigrams directed at Hayley that Blake composed c. 1809, Blake scholars and biographers typically cast Hayley as a creatively benumbing patron and an unimaginative and tedious man. Unfortunately, many Blake biographers and scholars ignore or disregard Hayley’s own view of Blake, including a published description that positions Blake in a manner comparable with Hayley’s view of his friend George Romney rather than associating Blake with what was considered the less prestigious, more mechanical (and therefore less creative) trade of engraving: “My friend, Mr. Blake, the Artist […] a person of varied talents, and of a creative imagination”. As Nicolas Shrimpton persuasively shows in Chap. 14 of this volume, revisiting Hayley’s relationship with Blake with nuance and care yields insights into their relationship and its productive effect on Blake.