The power of poetry and its intricate relationship with patronage networks becomes a topic of discussion during the reign of Süleyman I. Two rival high bureaucrats, Iskender Çelebi (d. 1535) and Ibrahim Pasha (d. 1536), whose executions established an epilogue for the first part of Süleyman I’s reign, would be remembered by poet-biographers as the greatest patrons of poetry by 1540s. Two other Pashas, Ayas (d. 1539) and Rustem (d. 1561), on the other hand, would be criticized by the same poets for their disinterest in poetry and poets. These bureaucrats’ interest in poetry differed from that of Suleyman I, the ultimate patron of literature. Unlike Suleyman who himself was a prolific poet, and whose correspondence with poet Baki is extant, none of the four bureaucrats composed poetry and, except for the biographical writing and praise poems dedicated to them, there is not much documentary evidence about their relationship with poets. Recent work on literary patronage in the Ottoman Empire defines a central role to it for the development of poetry. Relying on limited archival sources and selective reading of biographical dictionaries, these studies fall short to elucidate the larger question of relationship between poetry and readership. Distinct and divergent taste in poetry, the attendees of literary salons established around particular patrons, and the prevalence of gazel genre among the state elite and scholars, brings to mind an environment that engender and encourage poetic expression. By formulating patronage as a stagnant relationship between the poet and the patron in an empire where composing and/or appreciating poetry was an inevitable norm of being an elite, secondary literature obscures the essential association of Ottoman classical poetry to the ecology of the imperial organization in which it flourished. By casting an inquisitive eye on four important statesmen’s attitude towards poetry as readers and drawing on literary production under Suleyman I, the paper argues that patronage was a function of a wide interest in poetry and commentary, rather than the other way around, and investigates the reasons behind the heated discussion around the patronage in biographical dictionaries of the sixteenth century drawing on the representations of Suleyman I era as a “Golden Age” of poetry.