An important element of the way Flemish poet Anton van Wilderode is usually portrayed is the remarkable role he played as a poetry teacher and mentor of several pupils who would go on to become well-known writers themselves. This article will first of all look into the genesis of Van Wilderode’s own poetic views and practice and their relation with the historical, political and ideological context in which they took shape. Subsequently, it will examine how Van Wilderode’s poetology influenced his practice as a literature teacher and which were the underlying principles of this practice. In psychoanalytic jargon, one could say that Van Wilderode offered himself to his pupils as a subject supposed to ‘know’ (what literature is) and ‘enjoy’ (reading literary texts) and in doing so succeeded in aiming the desire of many of his pupils on literature, to the extent that several among them became writers themselves. This by no means implies that their literary views and writing practices would concur with those of their teacher. This is to be explained by the fact that Van Wilderode’s teaching aimed for autonomous subjectivation rather than the production of a following, but also – and to an even greater extent – by the fact that these authorships were articulated in institutional and discursive contexts that are profoundly different from those that helped shape Van Wilderode’s own authorship.