Wilbury Crockett

Wilbury Arthur Crockett (1913-1994) was an English teacher at Wellesley High School near Boston, Massachusetts where American poet Sylvia Plath was one of his students. He taught at the school for 36 years from 1944 until 1980. In 2012 a new school library was named after him.

Teaching career Crockett taught briefly in Connecticut before he and his wife Vera moved to Wellesley in 1944.

After his retirement in 1980 Crockett declined a job teaching creative writing at the Cambridge School of Weston.

After Plath showed some of her early poems to Crockett in 1947, she was "overjoyed" when he read them to the class and said that his comments "encouraged me greatly". 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."

A copy of Plath's The Colussus signed by the poet on her birthday, and with an inscription to Wilbury Crockett, was sold at Sotheby's in London in 2009 for £17,500.

Politics Crockett was a Democrat, which made him a target amongst the broader conservative Republican politics of Wellesley. He vocally opposed to American materialism. In 1952, at the height of McCarthyism, he was summoned to the Wellesley town board to discuss his politics and stated that he was a pacifist, and not a communist.