ALTHOUGH Norman Jeffares (always “Derry” to his friends) spent his life as an academic, he was the antithesis of the dry-as-dust professor.

Most widely known as an authority on W. B. Yeats, Jeffares was blessed with boundless energy, exuberance, good humour and shrewd sense. He held chairs of English at Adelaide, Leeds and Stirling and, never one to revise Hamlet while Macbeth waited to be written, published in such profusion as to overawe the most inquisitorial of research assessment boards.

In his spare time he founded and edited scholarly journals, set up learned societies whenever he saw the need, directed several series of critical works, and still found time to serve on such cultural bodies as the Arts Council, the Australian Humanities Research Council, PEN and the Scottish Book Trust.

In anyone else this relentless regimen might have seemed inhuman, but he also delighted in good food, good wine and good conversation — and, above all, in people. No matter how lofty his academic honours, he was always ready to further the careers of junior lecturers. Countless lives have been enhanced and books inspired by his generosity, and, since he was a citizen of the world, those who acknowledge their gratitude are to be found all over the globe.

Alexander Norman Jeffares was born in Dublin in 1920. He was proud of his Irish background (as also of his Scottish ancestors) and perhaps did more to stimulate the study of Irish literature and culture than any man of his time. He attended Dublin High School, and, as editor of the school magazine, gave an early demonstration of his dedication to making things happen by commissioning a poem from a reluctant W. B. Yeats, a former pupil of the school but then the grand old man of Irish letters.

It is to the credit of both that Yeats obliged and in What Then? produced one of the most impressive of his late works. Despite this coup, Jeffares entered Trinity College Dublin as a classicist rather than a student of English and indeed briefly lectured in classics there after graduating.

Finding his true calling in English literature, he took up a graduate place at Oriel, Trinity’s sister college in Oxford. By this time Yeats was dead, but his widow gave Jeffares access to his papers, and the young scholar’s DPhil became the basis for his first book, the much reprinted W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (1949).

While still working on his thesis, he had taken up the post of lector in English at the University of Groningen, and while in the Low Countries married Jeanne Calembert, whom he had first met in 1942 and who remained a wise, witty and welcoming companion all his life. In late 1948 they moved to Edinburgh where he had been appointed lecturer in English, but within three years he was offered the jury chair of English at Adelaide.

Here he developed an admiration for Australian literature, and this grew into an interest in the development of writing throughout the Commonwealth. He brought back this enthusiasm when he returned to a chair at Leeds in 1957, and under his championship the university became a pioneer in what is now known as postcolonial literature.

It was not merely that Jeffares took up a neglected field and demonstrated its importance to British readers, he also travelled indefatigably in Africa, Asia and the West Indies to reassure new and often uncertain indigenous departments of literature that the study of their own writers was a legitimate and crucial part of their mission.

His Irish birth freed him from any post-imperial baggage, while his natural friendliness and enthusiasm admitted no suspicion of condescension. His reign at Leeds saw him at the height of his powers: he built the School of English into one of the largest and most respected departments in the country, and attracted a rich diversity of overseas scholars and writers to trailblazing masters courses in American, Anglo-Irish, and Commonwealth literature.

By 1974 Jeffares, opting as ever for innovation rather than repetition, moved to a chair at the new University of Stirling. This not only offered him a new challenge, but also allowed him to make his home in the much-loved Scottish countryside. His productivity continued unabated, even after his retirement to Fife Ness in 1986 and his prodigious bibliography easily passed the 100-title mark.

Yeats remained at the core of his interests — he followed up his pioneer first study with commentaries on the poems and plays, as well as a volume in the Critical Heritage series, a biography, and numerous editions and selections, but he also published widely on Irish literature, with monographs on or editions of works by Swift, Joyce, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth and George Moore. His recent works include anthologies of Victorian and Irish love poems, editions of letters from Maud Gonne to Yeats and Iseult Gonne to Yeats and Pound, and a collection which at least triples the known poems and plays of Oliver St John Gogarty.

Jeffares was concerned not merely with making works widely available through editing and commentary, but also with the methods of their dissemination. He was a director of Colin Smythe, a firm that has led the way in reprinting otherwise unattainable texts, and while at Leeds he helped to set up the Association for Commonwealth Literature in 1964 and the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature four years later — organisations which continue to flourish.

Despite suffering from emphysema towards the end, and requiring frequent intakes of oxygen, he made occasional raids on London, a jolly, iconoclastic academic reiver, as full of good ideas and merriment as ever. Shortly before his death he finished co-editing a four-volume anthology of Irish literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.

One would have supposed that a life so crammed with work and achievement would have left no time for hobbies, but he was an accomplished artist (to say nothing of motor mechanic), and his first book was a collection of drawings of Trinity College Dublin. This gift was inherited by his daughter and only child, the artist Bo Jeffares, who, with his wife, survives him.

Professor A. Norman Jeffares, scholar, was born on August 11, 1920. He died on June 1, 2005, aged 84.