Wilbury Crockett

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Wilbury Arthur Crockett (1913–1994) was an English teacher at Wellesley High School near Boston, Massachusetts, where Sylvia Plath was one of his students. He taught there for 36 years, from 1944 to 1980, and served as Chair of the English Department until his retirement. In 2012 a new school library was named after him. Before moving to Wellesley with his wife Vera in 1944, he taught briefly in Connecticut.

At Wellesley, Crockett often taught the same cohort through all three years of high school, covering a wide range of literature. His courses included modern British and Irish authors, major American authors, Greek drama and philosophy, Shakespeare and the English poets, and European writers such as Thomas Mann and Gustave Flaubert, along with the Russian realists. His students called themselves “Crocketteers,” and many credit him with a lasting influence on their reading and ideas.

After retiring in 1980, Crockett declined a job teaching creative writing at the Cambridge School of Weston. When Plath showed him some early poems in 1947, he read them to the class and encouraged her. When her poetry collection The Collossus and Other Poems was published in 1960, she sent him a copy with the message, “To Mr. Crockett, in whose classroom and wisdom these poems have root.” In a note to a German acquaintance, Plath described Crockett as “an extraordinary man” who “does not try to indoctrinate us with ideas whatsoever, but is continually striving to get us to speak for ourselves and think also for ourselves.”