Yeats

also Yates

The Drumcliffe-Sligo Anglo-Irish, and the poet who imagined a country into being.

Territory of Yeats

CoreHistoric reach

The seat of Yeats

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Current mission

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What does the Yeats name mean?

From the Middle English *yate* (gate), as a locative byname for someone who lived near a town gate or kept a gate. The surname is of English origin and was brought to Ireland in the seventeenth century through the Yorkshire-Yeats Cromwellian planter line; by the late eighteenth century the Yeatses were a Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry family of Sligo (Drumcliffe parish) and the Dublin merchant class. The two great bearers of the surname, the painter John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) and his sons the poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and the painter Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), are descended from a Drumcliffe-Pollexfen-Yeats line on the maternal side and a Sandymount-Dublin merchant line on the paternal.

The history of Yeats

The Yeats family of Sligo descend, on the male side, from the Reverend William Butler Yeats (the poet's grandfather), rector of Tullylish in County Down, of a Cromwellian-planter Yeats line from Yorkshire; on the female side they descend from the Pollexfen-Middleton merchant family of Sligo, who had a small steamship line on the western coast and were a substantial Anglo-Irish Protestant family of the late nineteenth century.

John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) was the portrait painter of the late-Victorian Dublin school. His four children, all of whom became significant figures of the Irish Revival, were: William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), the poet, Nobel laureate 1923; Susan *Lily* Yeats and Elizabeth *Lolly* Yeats, founders of the Cuala Press in 1908; and Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), the painter who, by the critical assessment of Samuel Beckett, was the most significant Irish visual artist of the twentieth century.

W. B. Yeats was the founding editor of the *Dublin University Review*, co-founder with Lady Augusta Gregory of the Irish Literary Theatre (1899) and the Abbey Theatre (1904), member of the Irish Free State Senate (1922–1928), and Nobel laureate in Literature in 1923. He is, by the consensus of every twentieth-century critic, the foundational poet of modern English-language Irish literature.

Notable bearers of the Yeats name

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), poet, Nobel laureate 1923
Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), painter
John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), portrait painter
Susan and Elizabeth Yeats, founders of the Cuala Press

Stories of Yeats

Yeats and the Nobel speech
1923
On the evening of the fifteenth of December 1923, in the Concert Hall of the Old Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, William Butler Yeats, fifty-eight years old, the recently elected Senator of the Irish Free State (constituted on the fifteenth of January 1922) and the foundational poet of the Irish Literary Revival, delivered the Nobel Lecture upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him on the fourteenth of November 1923 for *his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation*. The Lecture, titled *The Irish Dramatic Movement*, ran for about forty-five minutes. He spoke about the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 with Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, the riots over Synge's *Playboy of the Western World* in 1907, the role of the theatre in shaping the new Irish state, and the long argument with the previous generation of his country's nationalist movement (a movement that had, by the date of the speech, won the political independence Yeats had been arguing for in his poetry for forty years). The speech was, by his own private statement to his wife George the next morning, the most consequential public statement of his life, and the moment at which the Irish literary movement (which he had founded with seven other people at George Pollexfen's house in 1888) entered the world canon of national literatures.
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Frequently asked

What does the surname Yeats mean?

Where does the Yeats family come from?

The Yeats family was historically based in Connacht in Ireland, in particular Sligo.

Who are some famous Yeatses?

Notable bearers of the Yeats name include William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), poet, Nobel laureate 1923, Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), painter, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), portrait painter and Susan and Elizabeth Yeats, founders of the Cuala Press.

Is Yates the same family as Yeats?

Yes. Yates is historical spelling variants of the Yeats name. They share the same lineage and clan affiliation.