Attempt to draw poet out from obscurity

Rising stars of the Romantics, they ridiculed Hayley '“ a fact which helped condemn him to the obscurity from which Diana Barsham, head of English and creative writing at the University of Chichester, is now trying to rescue him.

The work of Hayley has been ignored for the past 200 years but in the late 18th century he was one of the most popular poets of his day and his poem The Triumphs Of Temper was a best-seller.

Hayley created the heroine of the poem as a role model for women, advising them on how to respond cheerfully to the trials of marriage, especially when their partners were unfaithful.

Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Nelson's mistress, Lady Hamilton, were both avid readers. Georgiana claimed the poem saved her marriage.

By the late 1790s Hayley was a famous and successful poet.

It was at this time that a number of tragedies in his life led him to form a strong but ill-fated friendship with the artist, mystic and poet, William Blake

In 1800 tragedy struck when Hayley's dearest friend William Cowper died.

A week later his illegitimate and only son also died, aged only 19. Hayley's estranged wife had died three years earlier and he was left inconsolable.

Only William Blake seemed able to understand and address his sorrow, and as the friendship grew closer, Blake was persuaded to leave his native London to join Hayley in the village of Felpham.

Hayley was the direct inspiration for Blake's last two prophetic works, Milton and Jerusalem. But in 1803, artistic tensions between them led to a series of quarrels and Blake accused Hayley of stifling his genius.

Just as Blake had decided to leave Felpham, he became embroiled in an argument with a soldier in his cottage garden.

The soldier publically accused him of speaking treason against the King.

When Blake was forced to stand trial for sedition in Chichester, Hayley organised and paid for his defence and, after months of anxiety, Blake was finally acquitted.

But by then Hayley's career was in decline.

Blake had blackened his character in a series of lampoons he later regretted writing; meanwhile Byron and the new wave of Romantic poets ridiculed his style of writing.

Hayley had had his day. After embarking on a brief and disastrous second marriage with a much younger woman, he lived out his last years as a recluse writing his own biography.

To an extent, he suffered, Diana argues, because he represented a view of life which the French Revolution had destroyed: "He seemed to represent a culture which was demoded, and he knew that his best work was already done."

And yet he remained of 'incurably cheerful temper': "He was a very good and very kind and very generous man.

"Hayley worked tirelessly for other people. He worked perhaps more for other people's reputations and more successfully for other people's reputations than he did for his own."

But as Diana argues, it's that high price that he put on friendship which makes him so rewarding to study today.

"He was a poet of friendship and of the heart. He wasn't a poet concerned with sex and passionate love.

"He was a man that put his friends in front of everything. He brought people together. He was a great enabler of the arts for other people."