Stead, William Force

American poet and University of Virginia alumnus, class of 1908.

Stead was a student at the University of Virginia, 1904-1908.

William Force Stead (1884-1967) was a poet, clergyman and scholar. Born in Washington D.C., he moved to England in 1908 and remained there, for the most part, until 1939. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1916, received a B.A. and an M.A. from Queen's College, Oxford, and served as Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford from 1926 to 1933. Stead baptized T. S. Eliot into the Church of England in 1927. During these decades, Stead published seven volumes of poetry. In 1933 he was received into the Roman Catholic church and resigned his Anglican chaplaincy. In 1939 he returned to the United States where he taught English at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. from 1943 through 1958. Stead married Anne Frances Goldsborough in 1911; the couple had two sons.

William Force Stead was born in Washington DC in 1884. He attended the University of Virginia for several years, and in 1908 joined the United States Consular Service. From 1908 until 1915 he was a Vice-Consul in England, first in Nottingham and then in Liverpool. In 1911 he married Anne Frances Goldsborough in Baltimore, Maryland; the couple's first child, Philip, was born two years later. Their second son Peter was born in 1926.

Stead was ordained a minister in the Church of England in 1916, and served for two years as a curate at Ross-on-Wye. He received his B.A. in theology from Queen's College, Oxford in 1921, following which he was appointed Assistant Chaplain of the English Church in Florence, Italy. In 1926 Stead received an M.A. from Queen's College, and thereafter served as Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford from 1926 to 1933. It was during this time that he baptized his friend, the American-born poet T. S. Eliot, into the Church of England. Stead's other literary friends included W. B. Yeats, Edmund Blunden, Richard Cobden-Sanderson, C. S. Lewis, and Robert Sencourt.

Between 1911 and 1933 Stead published seven volumes of poetry, including Windflowers (1911), Festival in Tuscany (1927), and Uriel: A Hymn in Praise of Divine Immanence (1933).

In August of 1933 Stead was received into the Roman Catholic Church by the English Dominican Bede Jarrett. Anne Stead had become a Catholic three years earlier, and spent much of her time in a convent in Birmingham. As a result of his conversion, Stead resigned from the Worcester College chaplaincy; he moved to the nearby village of Clifton Hampden. During the 1930s, Stead published anthololgies, magazine articles and reviews; wrote a B.Litt thesis on the works of the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell; and published the first edition of Christopher Smart's Jubiliate Agno .

Stead and his son Peter sailed for the United States on August 12, 1939 to visit relatives in Baltimore. World War II broke out before they could return to England, and their passports were canceled. Anne Stead remained in England throughout the war, choosing to remain close to their oldest child, Philip, who had proved to be mentally handicapped and was institutionalized.

Stead never lived in England again, although he visited several times after the war. From 1943 through 1958 he was Professor of English at Trinity College in Washington, DC, a Roman Catholic school for girls. In Baltimore, Stead met Nancy Howard DeFord Venable, a widow and literary hostess, and eventually shared her homes in Baltimore and St. Mâlo, France with her. The pair traveled frequently and entertained literary friends, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, William Golding, Vere Somerset, and Tennessee Williams. Stead's health and memory began to fail in the final years of his life, and he died in Nancy Venable's Baltimore home on March 8, 1967.