She was only hours away from securing a place in both the history of Oxford and English poetry, but Ruth Padel was feeling anything but triumphant.

Padel, the great-great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin was preparing for the election, from which she was to emerge as Oxford’s first ever female professor of poetry, the first woman to be given the role since it was created in 1708.

Rather than being excited, however, she confessed to feeling shattered. Instead of pride, the 62-year-old poet felt tainted.

“I just feel hollow inside,” she told me. “I feel tainted by association, through no fault of my own.”

The lurid sex dossier sent to women across Oxford containing details of sexual harassment allegations against her main rival for the post, Derek Walcott, which ultimately led to the celebrated West Indian poet withdrawing from the race, had ensured the prestigious election would be remembered for a smear campaign.

But if the anonymous dossier sent to more than a 100 women was a tragedy for post regarded as second only to the Poet Laureate in terms of prestige, it was also a tragedy for her.

With Walcott, the favourite, pulling out last Wednesday, Padel had little difficulty winning Saturday’s two-horse race, securing 297 votes, against the 129 won by Indian poet Arvind Mehrotra.

Chair of the English Faculty Board, Dr Sally Mapstone, said: “It is tremendous that May 2009 has seen the election of the first woman professor of poetry at Oxford and the first woman Poet Laureate. Ruth Padel will be a dynamic and distinguished professor, and we are very pleased to welcome her.”

But after thanking the people who had voted for her and promising to fulfil their trust, with typical honesty Padel admitted her victory had been “poisoned” by the smear campaign against the 79-year-old Nobel Prize-winning poet, based on allegations made against him in 1982 and 1996 when he was teaching at Harvard and Boston universities in the United States.

An emotional Padel said: “To be the first woman in this august chair should have been an occasion for celebration. But for the moment it has been poisoned by the cowardly acts which I condemn and which I have nothing to do with. My backers and I have fought a clean campaign. Those acts have done immense damage to people and to poetry.”

Walcott had said he had chosen to walk away from an elections that had “degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination”.

But Padel is now faced with restoring the dignity and prestige of a post, previously held by the likes of Matthew Arnold, WH Auden, Robert Graves and Seamus Heaney.

It is hardly poetic justice that such a multi-talented woman, widely admired for her honesty and readiness to draw on a background that is an eclectic mix of arts and science, must take up the post with such an added burden. But it is tempting to believe that if anyone will be able to move things forward, it will be this hardworking and approachable descendent of Darwin.

For this is a woman, who apart from being a prize-winning poet, has sung in an Istanbul nightclub, with the Heraklion Town Choir on Crete, and the choir of St Eustache in Paris. She has helped excavate a Minoan road leading out of the palace of Knossos and produced one of the best travel books in recent times, based on a two-year journey through 11 countries in search of that most elusive animal, the tiger.

The daughter of a classics teacher, she was born in an attic at her great aunt’s home in Wimpole Street in London and her first job was playing viola in Westminster Abbey for £5.

Her mother lives in Oxford and she has retained close links with the university, where in the 1970s she lectured in Greek at Corpus Christi, Merton and Wadham, where she was the first Bowra fellow.

For her, one of the joys of Saturday’s election was attending a lunch given for her at Lady Margaret Hall, her old college, where she was reunited with student friends, some of whom she had not seen since 1968. There was certainly plenty to catch up about.

In 1984 she gave up full-time teaching to concentrate on writing poetry, with her first full-length collection, Summer Snow, drawing on her knowledge of ancient Greek history. The poetry collections that followed have seen her win the UK National Poetry Competition, with her poems widely anthologised, broadcast and shortlisted for all major British prizes.

She has also had numerous non-fiction books to her name, covering subjects as diverse as rock music and Greek tragedy.

Her last book celebrated the life of Charles Darwin in verse, covering his science, travels and family life.

Padel said: “My grandmother, Nora Barlow, was Charles Darwin’s grand-daughter. She edited several of Darwin’s books, including the first unexpurgated version of his autobiography. I remember my grandmother aged 95, one rainy evening when I was looking after her in Cambridge, talking to me about Charles’s evolving ideas and his awareness of how they affected his wife Emma’s faith. This made me long to write about the two of them together.”

She began reading Darwin seriously when researching her remarkable book Tigers in Red Weather. She took the Origin of Species with her, when she went into the tropical forests in Laos, Sumatra, India and Bhutan, famously setting off on her expedition armed with her granny’s opera glasses and a pair of Tunisian trainers.

The book describes how she decided to embark on the trip to mark the end of a long relationship.

She saw an advertisement for a cheap break to India but it turned out to be the start of a two-year journey to find out what is going on in tiger conservation.

Not only did it bring home her connection with her renowned forefather, it saw the poet emerge as one of the most passionate and original English voices to be warning about the threat to the tiger.

Her interest in wildlife has now become something of an obsession. She is presently working on a novel, which she says will involve snakes and the relationship of man with animals in the wildlife.

As professor of poetry, she is looking forward to getting to work on projects with Professor David Macdonald, of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, the celebrated wildlife expert who was recently named the UK’s ninth most influential living conservationist by BBC Wildlife magazine.

Her spirits had markedly improved on Monday, with no more talk of “a poisoned win”.

Instead she took comfort from high levels of support in what were now “trying circumstances”.

She had come across talk about allegations made against Walcott when she visited New York two weeks ago, which initially led her to suspect that the campaign against him might have been inspired from across the Atlantic.

Up to 200 academics were sent envelopes containing photocopied pages from a book called the Lecherous Professor, a study of sexual harassment on campuses published in 1984.

Padel last week maintained: “It was not a smear but a reminder of things from the past.”

While setting out her huge admiration for Walcott’s work, she hardly endeared herself to his backers by adding: “I think his supporters ought to have brought these things out at the beginning, then there would be none of this secret and anonymous stuff.”

She too had something of a taste of her past being brought up as a result of standing in the election.

One newspaper attempted to throw new light on her poem Home Cooking, said to be about sex on a kitchen table, by suggesting it involved an entanglement with another writer.

Her sense of optimism was clearly encouraged by a visit to an arts festival at St Peter’s College over the weekend, where she read to undergraduates.

“They were excited and passionate about poetry, especially poetry and science,” said Padel.

“That is what I should like to do: to explore what poems can give to students, college by college, department by department, in the humanities and the sciences over the next five years.

“I want to encourage right across the university, the reading, the writing and above all the enjoying of poetry, ancient and modern, in all its richness and variety. I don’t see being professor of poetry just being about delivering grand lectures.”

Padel is unique in being a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. Bringing science and poetry together, however, may prove easier than brokering any reconciliation with Derek Walcott supporters.

But few professors at Oxford are more acutely aware that things eventually do change, even if it can take time.