Paul Hamilton Hayne (January 1, 1830 – July 6, 1886) was a poet, critic, and editor from the American South.

Most importantly for literature and history, Hayne preserved Timrod's poems and edited them into a collection that was published in 1872 and that presented such historically important poems as "The Cotton Boll" and "Ode Sung On The Occasion Of Decorating The Graves Of The Confederate Dead".

Timrod has continued to influence other modern Southern writers, including the poet Allen Tate, whose most famous poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead", owes a great deal to Timrod's similarly titled poem.

Sonnets and Other Poems (1857) sold fewer than 200 copies, and Avolio (1859) was little noticed despite a positive review by James Russell Lowell.

[4] In a review of his work by Rayburn S. Moore, his influences are described as also including Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson, although the derivative nature and lack of intellectual force are considered weaknesses.

Moore considers strengths of Hayne's poetry to include the authenticity of detail and observation of locality and situation as well as the versatility of forms, metrical schemes, and techniques, especially in short poems and sonnets.