In succession to James Fenton and Paul Muldoon, Professor Christopher Ricks has been elected to the three-century-old Chair of Poetry at Oxford. He polled 39 votes more than Peter Porter, 109 votes more than Anne Carson. She did remarkably well, considering she was propelled into the race rather late, a woman in this hitherto male preserve, where only Dame Helen Gardner, one-time king-maker, and Dame Enid Starkie, a less successful schemer, had stalked before.

In the media, Professor Ricks was generally presented as the `establishment candidate'. First in the field, he was endorsed by many heads of houses and a distinguished congeries of dons. It was expected that, like his predecessor, he would be elected unopposed. But some of his dons jumped ship when Porter was nominated and preferred the poet, on the grounds that a practitioner might know more about the art than just another academic, even if that academic, long held in bondage in Boston, had been instrumental in creating the international critical context for a modern canon which includes Heaney, Hill, Larkin and Muldoon. And Bob Dylan.

How can a man whose latest book is an extended critical engagement with Bob Dylan be regarded as `establishment'? Much has been made of his grasp of `popular culture' (though Dylan represents a popular culture two generations out of date now), as though an educated individual of his generation, who loves language and lived through the years and conflicts that occasioned some of Dylan's songs, should feel embarrassed about owning up to an enthusiasm for the music. As though any manifestation of popular culture should be beneath scholarly effort, unworthy of the critical subtlety which Ricks had formerly invested in Milton, Donne, Clarendon and others. Yet it is precisely his grasp of popular culture in another sense, his continuing, deliberate attempt to understand the changing culture of his under-graduates and graduate students, that lends an urgency to his polemical writing. He can be as lucid and vehement as Arnold, the schools inspector who knew what was happening to language usage, spoken and written.

Can a man who understands the need for remedial teaching even at Oxford, who knows that contemporary undergraduates are victims of an ignorance not of their devising, and whose whole endeavour as a teacher and essayist has been to make redress, be seen as `establishment'? The inertia and connivance of that, or those, establishments here and abroad lead to Ricks writing his essay `Literary Principles as Against Theory' in 1985 (included in Essays in Appreciation, Oxford, 1996). This lucid, uncompromising credo, a little wrong-headed in retrospect but still arresting to read, was delivered as a lecture (he is among the best lecturers of our time) to an American audience. That audience is unlikely to have found the views expressed entirely simpático. They certainly struck a decidedly discordant note and still, differently, do.

Elsewhere, `relating some convictions', as he puts it, he declares as axiomatic that no critic, and no criticism, can be `disinterested'. His critical writing is deeply `interested', partial to `integrated work', and at the same time hostile to criticism and theory which make rebarbative, challenging and difficult work `amenable' or which reduce works of the imagination to the status of mere texts serving as grist to theoretical considerations.

`Against the claims of theory, I set the counterclaims of principle.' With Hopkins he discriminates between `principle' (rooted in lived experience, in particulars) and theory. Hopkins speaks of the inadequacy of rhetoric in English poetry. As a classicist, by rhetoric he means something precise, `all the common and teachable elements in literature, what grammar is to speech, what thoroughbass is to music, what theatrical experience gives to playwrights'. Rhetoric, Ricks says, `this teachable element in literature, is not theory, and it still has its legitimate claims and must not be ousted'. He does not confuse rhetoric and literature, but understanding of the one contributes to an understanding of the other; ignorance of the one certainly does not enable (as some theorists propose) understanding of the other. `Literature is, among other things, principled rhetoric.' To the authority of Hopkins, he adds, unapologetically, the authority of Eliot, who `is so thoughtful about feeling, and so aware of the difference between the task of combining and the luxury of confusing'. Such principles inform not only reading and writing, but also, crucially, teaching. `Literary study', he insists, `should be instinct with social and political judgments'. Our world is `hideously imperilled by falsity of feeling, so that it is as much a responsibility of the artist and of the teacher to bring people to understand illusions of feeling as feelings'.

It is invigorating to read the phrase, `a responsibility of the artist and of the teacher'. This congruence is not generally perceived. It is a congruence, and in the case of the teaching of literature, a complicity: Ricks is a teacher who, unusually, understands the didactic within the poem or prose passage in a subtle and complete way. He understands it not only as embodiment and argument but as style, that crucial and essentially moral decision that a writer makes, a decision that issues in form. For Ricks there is the given of text and getting it clear (a task for patient scholarship), and then getting its sense and nuance clear (a task for `interested' criticism). These are what fundamentally matter. Like Nabokov with his map of Dublin for Joyce, his plan of Gregor Samsa's room for Kafka, Ricks asks that the writing, and the response, be proportionate, commensurate and appropriate, informed by what is on the page and what we can know about it from context, resisting extraneous investment. He is the ideal teacher for the undergraduate, providing strict principles, exacting real discipline. He is not always able to be just to those critics - in this 1985 lecture, I have Frank Kermode particularly in mind - who engage theory with another kind of interest, a different level of intelligence, and with another constituency in mind.

Ricks's resistance to the argumentative strategies of certain theorists is a resistance to their style as much as to their content. His reading is informed by the disciplines he exercised in his first book, one which changed the way of reading, and writing, poetry of many undergraduates of my generation, Milton's Grand Style (1963). Here he applied the principles of Empson in detail and brought Milton wonder- fully alive. What will make him outstanding as a Professor of Poetry is that he is fascinated by the way the puzzle fits together, he loves the mechanics of verse, the wealth each word contains and the ways in which combinations of words release energies and powers. In this case, to borrow Randall Jarrell's image, the farmer understands at least as much about bacon as the pig.