Professor Alexander Norman Jeffares

IN 1937 A DUBLIN SCHOOLBOY approached no less a person than W. B. Yeats with a request that he write a poem for the school magazine of which he was the editor. He was informed rather haughtily that the poet was not at that moment writing anything that would be ‘suitable’ for mere schoolboys. The mere schoolboy persisted. In that case wasn’t it about time that he did write something suitable and let him have it? A week later one of Yeats’s finest poems, ‘What Then?’ arrived in the post and was..