Born on 25 July 1897 at Willesden, he was an only child and grew up in Leyton and Finchley. He came of Methodist and Anglican stock. His paternal grandfather was a Wesleyan minister, William Willey (1836-1892; e.m. 1857), who was mentioned, though rather dismissively, in the preface to Matthew Arnold's St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) and passed on to his son and grandson his intellectual and scholarly gifts.
After service in World War I, he took 1st class honours in the English Tripos at Cambridge in 1921, alongside F.R. Leavis and others. He lectured in English from 1923, was elected Fellow of Pembroke College in 1935 and succeeded Sir Arthur Quiller Couch in 1946 as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, his inaugural lecture being on 'The "Q" Tradition'. He gave the Hibbert Lectures in 1959 and the Warton Lecture, on Coleridge on Imagination and Fancy, in 1946 and was visiting professor at Columbia 1948-49 and at Cornell, 1953. He published a series of literary studies and his lectures in the Divinity Faculty appeared as Christianity, Past and Present in 1952. He received an honorary LittD from Manchester University in 1948. As literary adviser to the *Faith and Order Committee in the preparation of the 1975 Methodist Service Book, he disapproved of the use of the American RSV and the inclusion of the historic creeds. He was a governor of Rydal and Culford Schools. Two volumes of autobiography were published under the titles Spots of Time... 1897-1920 (1965) and Cambridge and Other Memories (1968). He died on 3 September 1978.
'A Wesleyan minister, the Rev. Mr. Willey, said the other day at Leeds: "He did not find anything in either the Old ar New Testament to the effect that Christian ministers should become State-servants, like soldiers or excisemen." He might as well have added that he did not find anything to the effect that they should wear braces.'
Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) p.xvi