He also wrote a paper on Chateaubriand which earned him a Parisian scholarship at the Sorbonne, where he completed a course of Contemporary French Literature, and there he made friends with many intellectuals: Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Albert Camus and the painter Henri Matisse, among others,[2] with whom he expanded his vision of a cultural aesthetic.
He gave lectures at the Ateneo de Madrid and befriended Antonio Buero Vallejo, José Corrales Egea, Vicente Soto, Miguel Labordeta and Francisco García Pavón, who, evoking those days, wrote: It was Ezequiel who put us in touch with the old masters.
After having been a student,[2] and a favorite, of Dámaso Alonso and José Camón Aznar, with the latter of whom he used to visit the Museo del Prado, at the end of the 1940s he was the ad honorem secretary of Luis Ruiz Contreras.
Between 1949 and 1950 he was a teacher at the Piedrahíta High School (Ávila), in the middle of the Sierra de Gredos; there he wrote Tres Elegías (Cementerio Civil; Aniversario siempre; A una niña difunta), only one hundred copies were printed (Valencia, 1951) to circumvent Franco's censorship, which could have been cruel to the first of those texts.
In 1952, fed up with the cultural and ideological asphyxia of his country, he obtained, through his friend Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar, who recommended him to José Ortega y Gasset, a contract as a professor of literature at the University of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where he met with professors such as the philosopher Antonio Salvador de la Cruz and the historian Juan Astorga and, at the University of Cuenca, with the philosopher Francisco Álvarez González and the Romanesque philologist Luis Fradejas Sánchez.
In 1958 he received a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Cuenca[2] and compiled the poems published in his Sunday column Lienzo y Lira, also in La Nación.
In 1997 he was appointed member of the Hispano-American Academy of Cádiz,[4] for which reason he returned to Spain after 45 years of absence, reading there a speech on José Enrique Rodó.