What was William Butler Yeats’s family like?

Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, western Ireland. Both parents claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families.

Yeats was the eldest of six children, two of whom died in infancy. His brother, Jack Butler Yeats, became a prominent artist, and his sisters, Susan and Elizabeth Yeats, founded Cuala Press, an enterprise of the Arts and Crafts movement.

William Butler Yeats married George Hyde-Lees in 1917. They had two children: Anne Butler Yeats, born in 1919, and William Michael Yeats, born in 1921.