As a power-broker within the small world of English studies, A Norman Jeffares, who has died aged 84, was legendary. "You'll have to go to Khartoum," he was reported to have said to a junior colleague, in whose career he had taken a patron's interest. "But don't worry, we'll get you back." General Gordon should have been so lucky.
"He was," says his friend Warwick Gould, who collaborated with Jeffares on their monumental edition of Yeats's poetry (published in 1989), "the most genial and generous man I met in my life." But even academics who knew him only by sight or reputation had a store of anecdotes about "Derry".
In one of the shifts of a peripatetic career, Jeffares took up a job in the early 1950s in Adelaide. As a young Oxonian pom, old hands advised him to keep his head down: when he bought a car he should get an unostentatious banger. Jeffares promptly bought a secondhand Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and went on to found the Vintage Car Club of Southern Australia. He also had great style - more than his English studies afforded, often. He liked to tell the story about how, as the most junior of lecturers at Edinburgh, in the bitter "austerity" winter of 1949, he witnessed the head of his department, Herbert Grierson, selling his clothes to stock the professorial drinks cabinet.
There are striking resemblances between Grierson's and Jeffares's contributions to their subject. Grierson made the Eliot-Leavis-Empson project possible with his pioneering edition of Donne's poetry. Such service functions (in the highest sense) also distinguish Jeffares's scholarly career.
He did his research on Yeats (begun as a postgraduate at Oxford) at the same time as Richard Ellmann. Their respective works WB Yeats: Man And Poet and Ellmann's Yeats, The Man And The Mask came out almost simultaneously in 1948. Unlike the American, who would follow the biographical track, Jeffares turned to the no less necessary tasks of annotating and editing. His New Commentary On The Poems Of WB Yeats (1968) is judged indispensable by specialists. The least haughty of commentators, he also did the York Notes (a series he founded) guidebook on the poet for sixth-formers.
A great organiser, Jeffares founded the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature and the journal Ariel (A Review of International English Literature). The names are significant. Born himself at a sectarian boundary during a civil war, (Southern Irish Protestant, 1920) and coming into intellectual maturity at a period when the tension between "international" and "national" was a central problem in his discipline, with the post-Suez collapse of English imperial dominion, Jeffares proved as adept an ideological broker as he was in managing the careers of junior colleagues.
To Jeffares should go the credit for the currently high-riding field of "postcolonial criticism". It was he who put in place the institutional foundation on which it rests, pioneering, as he did, Commonwealth studies at Leeds and using, with great diplomatic skill, the outreach of the British Council to promote it.
Jeffares was, unlike many in his profession, "businesslike". He was particularly skilled in dealing with publishers - he launched series as readily as he charted out new fields of study. Series editorship added to his formidable powers of patronage. A consummate professional, Jeffares did everything "quicker than any of his collaborators". Only someone with an unsual turn of speed could have amassed such an impressive range of publications from Shakespeare, through 18th-century drama to Scott and, virtually, the entire field of Irish literature.
Jeffares was born in Dublin and went to the city's high school. A much retold anecdote is his writing to the Nobel laureate (a former pupil) for a contribution to the school magazine. Yeats demurred, Jeffares insisted, and got his poem, "What Then?", Sang Plato's Ghost. A prophetic achievement.
Jeffares's subsequent academic career is an Odyssey. His two volumes of poetry, Brought Up In Dublin and Brought Up To Leave, signal his acceptance of exile. No less than Joyce, he would be cunning - but never silent. He was trained as a classicist at Trinity College Dublin and had his first post lecturing in classics there, in 1943-44. After graduate work at Oxford there was a brief stopover as lecturer in English at Groningen, followed by two years at Edinburgh (1949-51). Here, he married Jean Calembert. The couple had one child, Bo. He took up his first chair (while still barely 30) at Adelaide, where he remained until 1956, when he returned to Britain and a chair in the Leeds School of English.
Over the next decade and a half Jeffares established himself as a dominant player in a university system that was (post-Robbins) revolutionising itself. An excellent relationship with the university vice chancellor (and former cabinet minister) Edward Boyle helped. In 1974 he elected to move to the new Scottish university at Stirling.
Gould thinks that like Cincinnatus, Jeffares wished, in his mid-fifties, to "return to his farm". He retired in 1986, remaining an "honorary professor" at Stirling until his death. His last major contribution to the subject which he served (and formed) so effectively was an edition of Oliver St Gogarty's poetry.
He is survived by his wife and daughter.
· Alexander "Derry" Norman Jeffares, writer and academic, born August 11 1920; died June 1 2005
