Most recently, he has edited a new anthology of English Romantic Poets (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2022) that brings together the most loved poems of the age, together with many forgotten gems. Alongside classics such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “Frost at Midnight”, the immortal odes of Keats, and generous selections from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude, the reader will rediscover the wit of Byron, the wildness of Blake, the passion of Shelley, a wealth of nature poems by Clare, and the distinctive voices of women Romantics such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
In 2020, for the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Wordsworth, Jonathan published an innovative biography, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who changed the World (William Collins UK, Yale UP USA), telling the story of the poet’s life, analyzing his greatest poetry, setting him in the context of the Romantic revolution, and revealing his influence on later cultural developments such as the creation of National Parks. This was accompanied by a highly acclaimed series of documentaries for BBC Radio 4, In Wordsworth's Footsteps. Radical Wordsworth won the Bookends Award for Literature and was runner-up for the Lakeland Book of the Year. A “Book of the Year” in several national newspapers, it is now regarded as “the finest modern introduction to [Wordsworth’s] work, life and impact” (Financial Times).
In the case of John Keats, Jonathan took another innovative approach, writing his life and reading his work in “parallel” with the tumultuous life and radiant prose of one of the poet’s greatest admirers, F. Scott Fitzgerald: Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald (William Collins UK, Yale UP USA, 2021) was praised by the Wall Street Journal for how it “unabashedly, cheerfully celebrates the lasting power of literature.”
Jonathan played a major role in the revival of the reputation of the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” John Clare. His definitive biography, John Clare (Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003), won Britain’s two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, as well as the NAMI (New York) Book Award; it was shortlisted for four other awards including the Samuel Johnson Prize, and was widely reviewed as “a stunning achievement” and “an extraordinary work of scholarship”.
His editorial work in the Romantic period has also included Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (Oxford World's Classics, 1987), John Clare’s Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2004), and the introduction to the Folio Society edition of Lord Byron’s Selected Poems (2013),
