A MEMORABLE tutor to generations of Oxford students, Professor Jonathan Wordsworth was a leading authority on the Romantic period, whose work helped to revolutionise our sense of William Wordsworth, who was his great-great-great uncle.

Wordsworth’s poetry offers a special challenge to scholars because of his compulsive habit of going back to revise his texts, and his greatest work, the autobiographical epic The Prelude, is especially complicated as it exists in some 17 discrete manuscripts. William Wordsworth’s own view on such matters was unambiguous: the latest text was the one to read. But readers have often wondered about the wisdom of some of his alterations, and Jonathan Wordsworth was firmly of the view that the poet’s revisions were, for the most part, a mistake.

“On the whole poets are known by the best versions of their works; Wordsworth is almost exclusively known by the worst,” he roundly announced in the opening sentence of his first book, The Music of Humanity, and he set out to make good that damage by re-establishing, through onerous scholarly labour, the original texts that Wordsworth’s rewriting had buried.

Jonathan Wordsworth’s editorial work introduced to the canon Wordsworth’s tragic masterpiece The Ruined Cottage, hitherto known only in a heavily revised later version, and the early two-book version of The Prelude: both are now considered central to the poet’s achievement.

As an advisory editor of the great multivolume Cornell edition, he was additionally associated with one of the heroic editorial labours of our age, which brought into print in its entirety the enormous manuscript collection of the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage, in Grasmere, of which he was for many years a trustee and then chairman.

Yet for all his international eminence as a scholar, throughout his long career Jonathan Wordsworth remained deeply committed to teaching undergraduates. He was, in the best sense, an Oxford don of the old school, ready and able to teach everything from Chaucer to Wallace Stevens, Robert Henryson to Seamus Heaney, and uncomplainingly teaching for many hours more than his contract ever required.

His practical criticism classes, in particular, will long be remembered by those lucky to attend them, the group sitting on large cushions on the floor of his set and poring over a single poem for 90 minutes. Teaching would sometimes take the form of a riddle posed: What cliché does Thomas Hardy have in mind in The Convergence of the Twain, his tragi-comical poem about the Titanic and its iceberg? (Answer: they were made for each other.) To what genre does Kubla Khan belong? (Answer: nonsense poetry, alongside The Dong with a Luminous Nose.) His judgments were firm and often playful, and he delighted in provoking his pupils to judgments of their own.

Many of his students went on to become scholars in their turn and now occupy prominent academic posts across the world. Many others became writers, including the poets Craig Raine and Christopher Reid and the novelist Martin Amis, whose autobiography, Experience, includes some affectionate glimpses of Wordsworth, and who (or so it was rumoured among undergraduates) put a fictionalised version of his tutor into his first book, The Rachel Papers.

Jonathan Fletcher Wordsworth was born in 1932. He was descended from Christopher Wordsworth, the poet’s brother and Master of Trinity College. His father was Andrew Wordsworth, a master at Bryanston and a member of John Betjeman’s circle. One of Jonathan’s childhood memories was excitement around the breakfast table at the arrival of a new letter from “Betjers”. Both parents were colourful, and it was a bohemian upbringing, though overshadowed by the tragic death of his mother.

He went to Westminster and, after National Service, Brasenose College, Oxford, where he took a First in English. Work towards a doctoral thesis on the 15th-century Scots poet William Dunbar followed. But in 1957, somewhat to his surprise, Wordsworth was elected a Tutorial Fellow of Exeter College, and he abandoned the thesis.

After a few years “learning how to teach” (as he later put it) his attention was caught by an early Wordsworth poem reproduced in small print among the appendices to the old Oxford Poetical Works. Hearing that there was a better version still unpublished among the manuscripts at Dove Cottage, he headed north to transcribe it. His texts of The Ruined Cottage and its companion poem, The Pedlar, eventually appeared in The Music of Humanity

(1969), beside a long and searching discussion of Coleridge’s religious thinking and a pioneering account of what William Wordsworth had learned from it. The book remains a landmark in the field.

Jonathan Wordsworth had been made a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust in 1959, and in 1976 he became its chairman (a post he held until 2002, when he resigned to become its president). The editorial work continued with the standard parallel-text edition of The Prelude, edited with Stephen Gill and M. H. Abrams, which appeared in 1979. His second main critical work, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision, appeared in 1982.

The book showed to its best advantage his ability to unite a sure literary insight with deep scholarly expertise; and it showed, too, Wordsworth’s cheerful readiness to tick off his namesake. “Readers of Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem, The Prelude, must very often have wished it was shorter,” he began one essay.

That highly individual critical voice, doughty and distinctive, could be heard in dozens of chapters and articles that appeared over the years — not only on Wordsworth and his circle, but on Sterne, Shelley, Emily Brontë, Tennyson, Hardy, Stevens and many others.

A lot of these essays were originally given as lectures at the annual Wordsworth Summer Conference at Grasmere, for a long time the central fixture of the Wordsworthian year, of which Jonathan Wordsworth was the academic director from 1980 and director from 1993.

In 1980 he was appointed University Lecturer in Romantic Studies at Oxford, and he moved from Exeter to take up a Fellowship at St Catherine’s, which he held until his retirement. He was awarded a DLitt and elected to a personal chair. He remained extremely productive. For 15 years, beginning in 1990, he edited a handsome and important series of facsimile reprints, Revolution and Romanticism, rescuing many texts from oblivion (including many texts by women writers) and introducing each of the 180 volumes with a pithy and unfussily erudite introduction — small gems of exposition that were later collected into the volumes Ancestral Voices, Visionary Gleam, and The Bright Work Grows. In a no less active retirement he edited, with his wife, Jessica, The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry (2002), a copious book that unobtrusively redefined a literary epoch.

Jonathan Wordsworth was capable of great generosity. He liked individuals and not institutions — he was not always an effortless colleague — and regarded his pupils as individuals. He would insist, often to the consternation of US graduates, that he should be addressed not as Professor Wordsworth but as Jonathan (but not as Jon). His rooms were full of lovely things, including many excellent British watercolours, a subject in which he was deeply expert, and a “visionary head” by Blake, and he had a superb collection of rare editions.

He was as generous with his books as he was with his time: deciding that an undergraduate essay on Pope would benefit from a knowledge of the little-read early version of The Rape of the Lock, he picked his own beautiful first edition off the shelf and handed it to the startled student to take away for the weekend, only wrapping it in a carrier bag to protect it minimally against the rain on the bike ride back to Cowley.

He rarely spoke about his work, which he would have considered a pretentious thing to do. But once, in an interview in a Japanese scholarly journal, he was persuaded to describe his own practice as a critic: “An attempt to give readers a fuller understanding and enjoyment of poetry by placing it in context. It’s a patient activity, and a humble one — trying to bring out what’s there, not imposing one’s self and one’s 20th-century viewpoints on the poetry”. Scholarship for Wordsworth was properly never an end in itself but always a route to the greater enjoyment of poetry.

His first two marriages, to Ann and Lucy, were dissolved. He is survived by his third wife, Jessica, by their two sons and a daughter, and by four sons from his first marriage.

Professor Jonathan Wordsworth, scholar, was born on November 28, 1932. He died on June 21, 2006, aged 73.