IN 1937 a Dublin schoolboy approached no less a person than WB Yeats to ask that he write a poem for the school magazine he edited. He was told that the poet was not writing anything that would be “ suitable” for schoolboys. The schoolboy persisted. In that case wasn't it about time that he did write something suitable? A week later one of Yeats’s finest poems, What Then? Sang Plato’s Ghost arrived and was duly published in the school magazine.

The school was Yeats’s old school - he’d been a pupil in the 1880s - and the boy was Alexander Norman Jeffares, who became one of the 20th century’s most distinguished Yeats scholars.

This early pioneering spirit turned out to be typical. A prodder and provoker, he was always determined to make things happen when they might have seemed moribund.

He was born of southern county Protestant stock during the Irish War of Independence. And Derry (as he was universally known) was destined to fight his own wars in changing the face of English and Anglo-Irish studies (the latter he practically invented) during the next half-century.

He entered Trinity College Dublin in 1939, opting for classics. But he graduated, glad to leave classics behind (” too much work. All that bloody memorising!” ). Classics, however, had groomed him in strenuous and disciplined stables and he was now ready for the chase.

The first hurdle was not so much the PhD as the choice of subject. After some thrashing around, a friend read him a poem by the now dead Yeats and asked: “ What the hell does it mean?” Derry had no idea and his curiosity was aroused.

So a dinner party was concocted to which Yeats’s widow was invited. She told Derry that he was welcome to be let loose on her late husband’s books and papers. “Take anything you like,” she said, though she was liable to ring at 3am and demand the immediate return of a diary or a manuscript.

The Yeats texts were out of print, but Derry set his life’s pattern by completing his PhD in 15 months. In 1945 he went to Oxford, where he wrote the DPhil thesis that was to become his first major publication, WB Yeats: Man and Poet, in 1948. At Oriel he was supervised by D Nichol Smith, the academic kingmaker of his day, on whom, to some extent, he was to model himself. But he found Oxford rather dreary.

In April 1946 he began his university career as a lector in English at the University of Groningen. After a year there he married Jeanne Calembert, whom he had met in 1942 during an inter-university debate in Glasgow.

When they left Holland at Christmas 1948, Jeanne was pregnant. By the time their daughter, Bo, was born, Derry was a lecturer in English at Edinburgh University, earning just over ten pounds a week. One day, finding in a second-hand bookshop some books that had belonged to the distinguished scholar Herbert Grierson, he was told by the bookseller that Grierson was forced to sell many of his books to supplement his meagre pension. This incident had a profound effect on him. Derry was determined not to come out of academia into penurious old age. The answer lay in publishing. By the time he died he had more than 300 publications to his name. What pupil hasn’t used York Notes? What student or general reader hasn’t encountered Writers and Critics?

He also decided that Edinburgh University was not the place to establish financial security, and left in July 1951 for a chair in Adelaide, swapping a salary of 600 for one of 1,600. Here he stayed for six happy years, the chair allowing him scope for his ideas, and the country and climate encouraging a taste for good wine, which he continued to refine to the end of his life.

In 1957 he was offered the chair at Leeds University. For the English department in Leeds it was the start of an astonishing period of transformation. Derry built up the school of English into the biggest and one of the best in the country. He brought language and literature together, reformed the timetable and organised the UK’s first Commonwealth Literature Conference. He founded a workshop theatre, introduced four main types of BA honours so that students could concentrate on the areas that appealed to them, brought scholars and students to Leeds from all around the world and encouraged his own staff to gain experience and conduct research abroad. Among the luminaries he attracted to lecture on their disciplines were such names as Noam Chomsky and Iris Murdoch. Many Commonwealth writers of distinction were his students.

His influence was incalculable. Not surprisingly he became known as “the Kingmaker” and Leeds was the royal matrix of many a shining career. Students and staff from that era speak of the ferment of intellectual excitement as akin to being around London when Shakespeare and his contemporaries were at their height.

Then in 1974 he left to take up a chair in Stirling. His departure stunned and puzzled people. The truth is that he was not burnt-out but bored with Leeds. He believed he’d gone as far as he could there. “There would have been nothing left but sterile repetition. And after I left, it reverted to the little provincial place it was before.” This was said without bitterness as an impartial acknowledgement of what, in fact, happened.

He left Stirling in 1986, having already set up Academic Advisory Services and retired to Craighead Cottage at Fife Ness, where he and Jeanne lived until his death.It was not retirement, however. The stream of publications continued. As well as important works on Yeats and Irish literature, there were editions of Swift and Joyce, Irish and Victorian love poems, the Gonne-Yeats letters in 1994 and the Iseult Letters in 2004. And there was the monumental Collected Poems and Plays of Oliver St John Gogarty in 2001.

A week before his death he completed the Homeric task of co-editing four anthologies of Irish literature of the 18th and 19th centuries and he was working on his anecdotes. Indeed, he saw life as an endless anecdote.

When book lovers crowd into the great tent in Charlotte Square this August for the Edinburgh Book Festival, few will have any idea how it originated. But if you look through the papers of Professor Jeffares you will find one entitled A Proposal For An Edinburgh Book Fair.

Derry was the closest link any of us living now could have had with Yeats - the last of the Yeatsians. But he was certainly no humourless work-horse. He was a laughing titan of a man, at home with anybody who was not costive or pretentious.

Candour, compassion, humanity, warmth, undogmatic diversity, eagerness to help and the expertise to accompany it were his best virtues. He valued directness and simplicity in life as in his writing.

As chairman of the literature panel of the Scottish Arts Council he helped many writers. But he never imposed his own opinions or ideas, even on those whose work he never admired. He was a great listener. He was also a great draughtsman, a devoted son, husband, brother and father, a bon viveur, an inveterate tinkerer with and buyer of cars (one for every year of his life), a concerned neighbour, a carer for the community, and the most unbendingly loyal, and generous friend anyone could hope to have.

Fife Ness juts out to sea off the edge of Scotland like a terrier’s muzzle. To those who live thereabouts it’s almost an island. The island has now lost its Prospero, its Nestor, its Ulysses. He could do more than quote you chapter and verse on literature. He could tell you who smoked the best fish or sold the best bacon, where to find a good mechanic, accountant or bottle of wine. His hand was always open, the eyes twinkling.

I think Derry will forgive me if I try to sum him up by quoting not from an Irish writer but from Sir Izaak Walton, who wrote that “it may be said of angling what the late Dr Boteler says of strawberries: ’Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did’.” Doubtless God could have made a better gentleman-scholar and loving friend than Derry Jeffares - but doubtless God never did.