Don Emilio and Emilio

Abstract

Personal memories are important when it comes to defining a teaching profession and the roots of a vocation that turns the subjects studied into life. This vital dynamic acquires decisive value when it comes to reading and poetic creation. The teacher Don Emilio ends up being his friend Emilio, when the philologist opens the doors to the work of two fundamental poets of the post-war period: Blas de Otero and Ángel González. The worlds of words, the capacity for deep meaning of a noun, an adjective or an adverb, are perspectives that help us to understand the legacy of history in our way of speaking and the social commitment of poetic language beyond the debates of the times or political attitudes. The elaborate realism and simple difficulty of Otero y González, studied by Alarcos, is a living lesson for a poet who wanted to move away from aestheticism and to investigate in the 1970s and 1980s the presence of history in the intimacy of a sentimental education.