Oscillation
Oscillation is the repetitive variation in time, of some measure about a central value or between two or more different states. The term vibration is used to describe mechanical oscillation. Familiar examples of oscillation include a swinging pendulum and alternating current. Oscillations occur not only in mechanical systems but in dynamic systems in every area of science: for example the beating of the human heart, business cycles in economics, predator–prey population cycles in ecology, geothermal geysers in geology, vibration of strings in guitar and other string instruments, periodic firing of nerve cells in the brain, the periodic swelling of Cepheid variable stars in astronomy; the simplest mechanical oscillating system is a weight attached to a linear spring subject to only weight and tension. Such a system may be approximated on an air ice surface; the system is in an equilibrium state. If the system is displaced from the equilibrium, there is a net restoring force on the mass, tending to bring it back to equilibrium.
However, in moving the mass back to the equilibrium position, it has acquired momentum which keeps it moving beyond that position, establishing a new restoring force in the opposite sense. If a constant force such as gravity is added to the system, the point of equilibrium is shifted; the time taken for an oscillation to occur is referred to as the oscillatory period. The systems where the restoring force on a body is directly proportional to its displacement, such as the dynamics of the spring-mass system, are described mathematically by the simple harmonic oscillator and the regular periodic motion is known as simple harmonic motion. In the spring-mass system, oscillations occur because, at the static equilibrium displacement, the mass has kinetic energy, converted into potential energy stored in the spring at the extremes of its path; the spring-mass system illustrates some common features of oscillation, namely the existence of an equilibrium and the presence of a restoring force which grows stronger the further the system deviates from equilibrium.
All real-world oscillator systems are thermodynamically irreversible. This means there are dissipative processes such as friction or electrical resistance which continually convert some of the energy stored in the oscillator into heat in the environment; this is called damping. Thus, oscillations tend to decay with time unless there is some net source of energy into the system; the simplest description of this decay process can be illustrated by oscillation decay of the harmonic oscillator. In addition, an oscillating system may be subject to some external force, as when an AC circuit is connected to an outside power source. In this case the oscillation is said to be driven; some systems can be excited by energy transfer from the environment. This transfer occurs where systems are embedded in some fluid flow. For example, the phenomenon of flutter in aerodynamics occurs when an arbitrarily small displacement of an aircraft wing results in an increase in the angle of attack of the wing on the air flow and a consequential increase in lift coefficient, leading to a still greater displacement.
At sufficiently large displacements, the stiffness of the wing dominates to provide the restoring force that enables an oscillation. The harmonic oscillator and the systems it models have a single degree of freedom. More complicated systems have more degrees of freedom, for example three springs. In such cases, the behavior of each variable influences that of the others; this leads to a coupling of the oscillations of the individual degrees of freedom. For example, two pendulum clocks mounted on a common wall will tend to synchronise; this phenomenon was first observed by Christiaan Huygens in 1665. The apparent motions of the compound oscillations appears complicated but a more economic, computationally simpler and conceptually deeper description is given by resolving the motion into normal modes. More special cases are the coupled oscillators where energy alternates between two forms of oscillation. Well-known is the Wilberforce pendulum, where the oscillation alternates between an elongation of a vertical spring and the rotation of an object at the end of that spring.
As the number of degrees of freedom becomes arbitrarily large, a system approaches continuity. Such systems have an infinite number of normal modes and their oscillations occur in the form of waves that can characteristically propagate; the mathematics of oscillation deals with the quantification of the amount that a sequence or function tends to move between extremes. There are several related notions: oscillation of a sequence of real numbers, oscillation of a real valued function at a point, oscillation of a function on an interval. Crystal oscillator Neutron stars Cyclic Model Neutral particle oscillation, e.g. neutrino oscillations Quantum harmonic oscillator Cellular Automata oscillator Media related to Oscillation at Wikimedia Commons Vibrations – a chapter from an online textbook
Experimental rock
Experimental rock is a subgenre of rock music which pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. Artists aim to liberate and innovate, with some of the genre's distinguishing characteristics being improvisational performances, avant-garde influences, odd instrumentation, opaque lyrics, unorthodox structures and rhythms, an underlying rejection of commercial aspirations. From its inception, rock music was experimental, but it was not until the late 1960s that rock artists began creating extended and complex compositions through advancements in multitrack recording. In 1967, the genre was as commercially viable as pop music, but by 1970, most of its leading players had incapacitated themselves in some form. In Germany, the krautrock subgenre merged elements of improvisation and psychedelic rock with avant-garde and contemporary classical pieces. In the 1970s, significant musical crossbreeding took place in tandem with the developments of punk and new wave, DIY experimentation, electronic music.
Funk, jazz-rock, fusion rhythms became integrated into experimental rock music. The first wave of 1980s experimental rock groups had few direct precedents for their sound. In the decade, avant-rock pursued a psychedelic aesthetic that differed from the self-consciousness and vigilance of earlier post-punk. During the 1990s, a loose movement known as post-rock became the dominant form of experimental rock; as of the 2010s, the term "experimental rock" has fallen to indiscriminate use, with many modern rock bands being categorized under prefixes such as "post-", "kraut-", "psych-", "noise-". Although experimentation had always existed in rock music, it was not until the late 1960s that new openings were created from the aesthetic intersecting with the social. In 1966, the boundaries between pop music and the avant-garde began to blur as rock albums were conceived and executed as distinct, extended statements. Self-taught rock musicians in the middle and late 1960s drew from the work of composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio.
Academic Bill Martin writes: "in the case of imitative painters, what came out was always derivative, whereas in the case of rock music, the result could be quite original, because assimilation and imitation are integral parts of the language of rock." Martin says that the advancing technology of multitrack recording and mixing boards were more influential to experimental rock than electronic instruments such as the synthesizer, allowing the Beatles and the Beach Boys to become the first crop of non-classically trained musicians to create extended and complex compositions. Drawing from the influence of George Martin, the Beatles' producer, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, music producers after the mid 1960s began to view the recording studio as an instrument used to aid the process of composition; when the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds was released to a four-month chart stay in the British top 10, many British groups responded to the album by making more experimental use of recording studio techniques.
In the late 1960s, groups such as the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs, the Beatles, the Jimi Hendrix Experience began incorporating elements such as avant-garde music, sound collage, poetry in their work. Historian David Simonelli writes that, further to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", the band's February 1967 double A-side single, pairing "Strawberry Fields Forever" with "Penny Lane", "establish the Beatles as the most avant-garde composers of the postwar era". Aside from the Beatles, author Doyle Greene identifies Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground, Plastic Ono Band, Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine and Nico as "pioneers of avant-rock". In addition, The Quietus' Ben Graham described duos the Silver Apples and Suicide as antecedents of avant-rock. In the opinion of Stuart Rosenberg, the first "noteworthy" experimental rock group was the Mothers of Invention led by composer Frank Zappa, who professor Kelly Fisher Lowe claims "set the tone" for experimental rock with the way he incorporated "countertextural aspects... calling attention to the recordedness of the album."
This would be reflected in other contemporary experimental rock LPs, such as the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Smile, the Who's The Who Sell Out and Tommy, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; the Velvet Underground were a "groundbreaking group in experimental rock", according to Rosenberg, "even further out of step with popular culture than the early recordings of the Mothers of Invention." The band were playing experimental rock in 1965 before other significant countercultural rock scenes had developed, pioneering avant-rock through their integration of minimalist rock and avant-garde ideas. The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's inspired a new consideration for experimental rock as commercially viable music. Once the group released their December 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour, author Barry Faulk writes, "pop music and experimental rock were synonymous, the Beatles stood at the apex of a progressive movement in musical capitalism"; as progressive rock developed, experimental rock acquired notoriety alongside art rock.
By 1970, most of the musicians, at the forefront of experimental rock had incapacitated themselves. From on, the ideas and work of British artist and former Roxy Music member Brian Eno—which suggested that ideas from the art world, including those of experimental music and the avant-garde, should be deployed in the context of experimental rock—were a key innovation throughout the decade. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Germany's "krautrock"
LP record
The LP is an analog sound storage medium, a vinyl record format characterized by a speed of 33 1⁄3 rpm, a 12- or 10-inch diameter, use of the "microgroove" groove specification. Introduced by Columbia in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry. Apart from a few minor refinements and the important addition of stereophonic sound, it has remained the standard format for vinyl albums. At the time the LP was introduced, nearly all phonograph records for home use were made of an abrasive shellac compound, employed a much larger groove, played at 78 revolutions per minute, limiting the playing time of a 12-inch diameter record to less than five minutes per side; the new product was a 12- or 10-inch fine-grooved disc made of PVC and played with a smaller-tipped "microgroove" stylus at a speed of 33 1⁄3 rpm. Each side of a 12-inch LP could play for about 22 minutes. Only the microgroove standard was new, as both vinyl and the 33 1⁄3 rpm speed had been used for special purposes for many years, as well as in one unsuccessful earlier attempt to introduce a long-playing record for home use by RCA Victor.
Although the LP was suited to classical music because of its extended continuous playing time, it allowed a collection of ten or more pop music recordings to be put on a single disc. Such collections, as well as longer classical music broken up into several parts, had been sold as sets of 78 rpm records in a specially imprinted "record album" consisting of individual record sleeves bound together in book form; the use of the word "album" persisted for the one-disc LP equivalent. The prototype of the LP was the soundtrack disc used by the Vitaphone motion picture sound system, developed by Western Electric and introduced in 1926. For soundtrack purposes, the less than five minutes of playing time of each side of a conventional 12-inch 78 rpm disc was not acceptable; the sound had to play continuously for at least 11 minutes, long enough to accompany a full 1,000-foot reel of 35 mm film projected at 24 frames per second. The disc diameter was increased to 16 inches and the speed was reduced to 33 1⁄3 revolutions per minute.
Unlike their smaller LP descendants, they were made with the same large "standard groove" used by 78s. Unlike conventional records, the groove started at the inside of the recorded area near the label and proceeded outward toward the edge. Like 78s, early soundtrack discs were pressed in an abrasive shellac compound and played with a single-use steel needle held in a massive electromagnetic pickup with a tracking force of five ounces. By mid-1931, all motion picture studios were recording on optical soundtracks, but sets of soundtrack discs, mastered by dubbing from the optical tracks and scaled down to 12 inches to cut costs, were made as late as 1936 for distribution to theaters still equipped with disc-only sound projectors. Syndicated radio programming was distributed on 78 rpm discs beginning in 1928; the desirability of longer continuous playing time soon led to the adoption of the Vitaphone soundtrack disc format. 16-inch 33 1⁄3 rpm discs playing about 15 minutes per side were used for most of these "electrical transcriptions" beginning about 1930.
Transcriptions were variously recorded inside out with an outside start. Longer programs, which required several disc sides, pioneered the system of recording odd-numbered sides inside-out and even-numbered sides outside-in so that the sound quality would match from the end of one side to the start of the next. Although a pair of turntables was used, to avoid any pauses for disc-flipping, the sides had to be pressed in a hybrid of manual and automatic sequencing, arranged in such a manner that no disc being played had to be turned over to play the next side in the sequence. Instead of a three-disc set having the 1–2, 3–4 and 5–6 manual sequence, or the 1–6, 2–5 and 3–4 automatic sequence for use with a drop-type mechanical record changer, broadcast sequence would couple the sides as 1–4, 2–5 and 3–6; some transcriptions were recorded with a vertically modulated "dale" groove. This was found to allow deeper bass and an extension of the high-end frequency response. Neither of these was a great advantage in practice because of the limitations of AM broadcasting.
Today we can enjoy the benefits of those higher-fidelity recordings if the original radio audiences could not. Transcription discs were pressed only in shellac, but by 1932 pressings in RCA Victor's vinyl-based "Victrolac" were appearing. Other plastics were sometimes used. By the late 1930s, vinyl was standard for nearly all kinds of pressed discs except ordinary commercial 78s, which continued to be made of shellac. Beginning in the mid-1930s, one-off 16-inch 33 1⁄3 rpm lacquer discs were used by radio networks to archive recordings of their live broadcasts, by local stations to delay the broadcast of network programming or to prerecord their own productions. In the late 1940s, magnetic tape recorders were adopted by the networks to pre-record shows or repeat them for airing in different time zones, but 16-inch vinyl pressings continued to be used into the early 1960s for non-network distribution of prerecorded programming. Use of the LP's microgroove standard began in the late 1950s, in the 1960s the discs were reduced to 12 inches, becoming physically indistinguishable from ordinary LPs.
Unless the quantity required was small, pressed discs were a more economica
Psychedelic music
Psychedelic music is a wide range of popular music styles and genres influenced by 1960s psychedelia, a subculture of people who used psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and DMT to experience visual and auditory hallucinations and altered states of consciousness. Psychedelic music may aim to enhance the experience of using these drugs. Psychedelic music emerged during the 1960s among folk and rock bands in the United States and the United Kingdom, creating the subgenres of psychedelic folk, psychedelic rock, acid rock, psychedelic pop before declining in the early 1970s. Numerous spiritual successors followed in the ensuing decades, including progressive rock and heavy metal. Since the 1970s, revivals have included psychedelic funk, neo-psychedelia, psychedelic hip hop, as well as psychedelic electronic music genres such as acid house, trance music, new rave. "Psychedelic" as an adjective is misused, with many so-called acts playing in a variety of styles. Acknowledging this, author Michael Hicks explains: To understand what makes music stylistically "psychedelic," one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization, depersonalization, dynamization.
Dechronicization permits the drug user to move outside of conventional perceptions of time. Depersonalization allows the user to lose the self and gain an "awareness of undifferentiated unity." Dynamization, as Leary wrote, makes everything from floors to lamps seem to bends, as "familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures"... Music, "psychedelic" mimics these three effects. A number of features are quintessential to psychedelic music. Exotic instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla are common. Songs have more disjunctive song structures and time signature changes, modal melodies, drones than contemporary pop music. Surreal, esoterically or literary-inspired, lyrics are used. There is a strong emphasis on extended instrumental segments or jams. There is a strong keyboard presence, in the 1960s using electronic organs, harpsichords, or the Mellotron, an early tape-driven'sampler' keyboard. Elaborate studio effects are used, such as backwards tapes, panning the music from one side to another of the stereo track, using the "swooshing" sound of electronic phasing, long delay loops, extreme reverb.
In the 1960s there was a use of electronic instruments such as the theremin. Forms of electronic psychedelia employed repetitive computer-generated beats. From the second half of the 1950s, Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg wrote about and took drugs, including cannabis and Benzedrine, raising awareness and helping to popularise their use. In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other psychedelics was advocated by new proponents of consciousness expansion such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler, according to Laurence Veysey, they profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth; the psychedelic lifestyle had developed in California in San Francisco, by the mid-1960s, with the first major underground LSD factory established by Owsley Stanley. From 1964 the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events involving the taking of LSD, accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music known as the psychedelic symphony.
The Pranksters helped popularise LSD use, through their road trips across America in a psychedelically-decorated converted school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. San Francisco had an emerging music scene of folk clubs, coffee houses and independent radio stations that catered to the population of students at nearby Berkeley and the free thinkers that had gravitated to the city. There was a culture of drug use among jazz and blues musicians, in the early 1960s use of drugs including cannabis, mescaline and LSD began to grow among folk and rock musicians. One of the first musical uses of the term "psychedelic" in the folk scene was by the New York-based folk group The Holy Modal Rounders on their version of Lead Belly's'Hesitation Blues' in 1964. Folk/avant-garde guitarist John Fahey recorded several songs in the early 1960s experimented with unusual recording techniques, including backwards tapes, novel instrumental accompaniment including flute and sitar.
His nineteen-minute "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party" "anticipated elements of psychedelia with its nervy improvisations and odd guitar tunings". Folk guitarist Sandy Bull's early work "incorporated elements of folk and Indian and Arabic-influenced dronish modes", his 1963 album Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo explores various styles and "could be described as one of the first psychedelic records". Soon musicians began to refer to the drug and attempted to recreate or reflect the experience of taking LSD in their music, just as it was reflected in psychedelic art and film; this trend ran in parallel in both America and Britain and as part of the interconnected folk and rock scenes. As pop music began incorporating psychedelic sounds, the genre emerged as a mainstream and commercial force. Psychedelic rock reached its peak in the last years of the decade. From 1967 to 1968, it was the prevailing sound of rock music, either in the whimsical British variant, or the harder American West Coas
Piano
The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700, in which the strings are struck by hammers. It is played using a keyboard, a row of keys that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings; the word piano is a shortened form of pianoforte, the Italian term for the early 1700s versions of the instrument, which in turn derives from gravicembalo col piano e forte and fortepiano. The Italian musical terms piano and forte indicate "soft" and "loud" in this context referring to the variations in volume produced in response to a pianist's touch or pressure on the keys: the greater the velocity of a key press, the greater the force of the hammer hitting the strings, the louder the sound of the note produced and the stronger the attack; the name was created as a contrast to harpsichord, a musical instrument that doesn't allow variation in volume. The first fortepianos in the 1700s had smaller dynamic range.
An acoustic piano has a protective wooden case surrounding the soundboard and metal strings, which are strung under great tension on a heavy metal frame. Pressing one or more keys on the piano's keyboard causes a padded hammer to strike the strings; the hammer rebounds from the strings, the strings continue to vibrate at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that amplifies by more efficiently coupling the acoustic energy to the air; when the key is released, a damper stops the strings' vibration, ending the sound. Notes can be sustained when the keys are released by the fingers and thumbs, by the use of pedals at the base of the instrument; the sustain pedal enables pianists to play musical passages that would otherwise be impossible, such as sounding a 10-note chord in the lower register and while this chord is being continued with the sustain pedal, shifting both hands to the treble range to play a melody and arpeggios over the top of this sustained chord.
Unlike the pipe organ and harpsichord, two major keyboard instruments used before the piano, the piano allows gradations of volume and tone according to how forcefully a performer presses or strikes the keys. Most modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, 52 white keys for the notes of the C major scale and 36 shorter black keys, which are raised above the white keys, set further back on the keyboard; this means that the piano can play 88 different pitches, going from the deepest bass range to the highest treble. The black keys are for the "accidentals". More some pianos have additional keys. Most notes have three strings, except for the bass; the strings are sounded when keys are pressed or struck, silenced by dampers when the hands are lifted from the keyboard. Although an acoustic piano has strings, it is classified as a percussion instrument rather than as a stringed instrument, because the strings are struck rather than plucked. There are two main types of piano: the upright piano.
The grand piano is used for Classical solos, chamber music, art song, it is used in jazz and pop concerts. The upright piano, more compact, is the most popular type, as it is a better size for use in private homes for domestic music-making and practice. During the 1800s, influenced by the musical trends of the Romantic music era, innovations such as the cast iron frame and aliquot stringing gave grand pianos a more powerful sound, with a longer sustain and richer tone. In the nineteenth century, a family's piano played the same role that a radio or phonograph played in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, music publishers produced many musical works in arrangements for piano, so that music lovers could play and hear the popular pieces of the day in their home; the piano is employed in classical, jazz and popular music for solo and ensemble performances and for composing and rehearsals. Although the piano is heavy and thus not portable and is expensive, its musical versatility, the large number of musicians and amateurs trained in playing it, its wide availability in performance venues and rehearsal spaces have made it one of the Western world's most familiar musical instruments.
With technological advances, amplified electric pianos, electronic pianos, digital pianos have been developed. The electric piano became a popular instrument in the 1960s and 1970s genres of jazz fusion, funk music and rock music; the piano was founded on earlier technological innovations in keyboard instruments. Pipe organs have been used since Antiquity, as such, the development of pipe organs enabled instrument builders to learn about creating keyboard mechanisms for sounding pitches; the first string instruments with struck strings were the hammered dul
Kapp Records
Kapp Records was an independent record label started in 1954 by David Kapp, brother of Jack Kapp. David Kapp founded his own label after stints with RCA Victor. Kapp licensed its records to London Records for release in the UK. In 1967, David Kapp sold his label to MCA Inc. and the label was placed under Uni Records management. Catalogue albums that continued to sell were reissued on the MCA label. Kapp's subsidiaries included Medallion Records, Congress Records, Leader Records, Four Corners Records with its "4 Corners of the World" logo. Four Corners was formed to promote European artists, such as Françoise Hardy, Raymond Lefèvre, the Barclay Singers. Today, the Kapp Records catalog is owned by MCA's successor-in-interest Universal Music Group through its Geffen Records subsidiary. 1954: Kapp Records was created by David Kapp. 1960: Kapp Records released one of the first cover versions of songs from The Sound of Music, running on Broadway at that time. The Pete King Chorale was featured on the album.
1964: Kapp Records released "Hello Dolly" sung by Louis Armstrong that became the number one song in America on Billboard Top 100, two months after The Beatles' arrived from England. The label distributed American releases by another successful British Invasion group, The Searchers. 1966: The record label released the original cast album of Man of La Mancha their most successful cast album. 1967: David Kapp sold his label to MCA Inc. and became a division of Uni Records. 1973: MCA released the last Kapp record. The catalog and artist roster was absorbed by MCA Records. 2003: MCA Records is absorbed into Geffen Records, which manages Kapp's pop/rock/R&B catalogs. The country and musical theatre catalogs are now managed by MCA Nashville Records, GRP Records, Decca Broadway, respectively. Decca Broadway released a remastered version of the Man of La Mancha original cast album in 2001. Throughout Kapp's history, its logo was a stylized "K" incorporating a phonograph record design. Three versions of this logo appeared during the company's history.
Until 1970, this logo appeared on a drum major's cap in a wordplay of the label's name. 1950s: Stylized "K/record" logo and KAPP at top of either red/white, silver/maroon or purplish red/white labels. Early 1960s: Black label with white "K/record" logo and KAPP in red at top, a similar design had a red drum major cap and KAPP in yellow at top. Mid to late 1960s: Black label with red drum major cap and KAPP in black letters in white box at left for singles, at top for albums. 1970-1972: Purple, red and yellow label with new "K" logo, either in black or in white inside black box, at left. Hall, Claude: "MCA Drops Vocalion, Decca and Uni", February 10, 1973 Kapp Records story from BSN Pubs A collection of Kapp record labels Kapp Records 45 rpm discography Kapp Records on the Internet Archive's Great 78 Project
W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, in his years served as a Senator of the Irish Free State for two terms, he was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. Yeats was born in Sandymount and educated there and in London, he spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted until the turn of the 20th century, his earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more realistic, he renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. William Butler Yeats was born at Sandymount in Ireland, his father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, well-known painter who died in 1712. Benjamin Yeats, Jervis's grandson and William's great-great-grandfather, had in 1773 married Mary Butler of a landed family in County Kildare. Following their marriage, they kept the name Butler. Mary was a descendant of the Butler of Ormond family from the Neigham Gowran branch. By his marriage, William's father John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherley School of Fine Art in London, his mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy merchant family in Sligo, who owned a milling and shipping business. Soon after William's birth the family relocated to the Pollexfen home at Merville, Sligo to stay with her extended family, the young poet came to think of the area as his childhood and spiritual home, its landscape became, over time and symbolically, his "country of the heart".
So did its location on the sea. The Butler Yeats family were artistic. Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage, informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W. B. Y." Yeats's childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy. The 1880s saw the rise of the home rule movement; these developments had a profound effect on his poetry, his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography. In 1867, the family moved to England to aid John, to further his career as an artist.
At first the Yeats children were educated at home. Their mother entertained them with Irish folktales. John provided an erratic education in geography and chemistry, took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside. On 26 January 1877, the young poet entered the Godolphin school, he did not distinguish himself academically, an early school report describes his performance as "only fair. Better in Latin than in any other subject. Poor in spelling". Though he had difficulty with mathematics and languages, he was fascinated by zoology. In 1879 the family moved to Bedford Park taking a two-year lease on 8 Woodstock Road. For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the suburbs of Harold's Cross and Howth. In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at Dublin's Erasmus Smith High School, his father's studio was nearby and William spent a great deal of time there, where he met many of the city's artists and writers. During this period he started writing poetry, and, in 1885, the Dublin University Review published Yeats's first poems, as well as an essay entitled "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson".
Between 1884 and 1886, William attended the Metropolitan School of Art—now the National College of Art and Design—in Thomas Street. In March 1888 the family moved to 3 Blenheim Road in Bedford Park; the rent on the house was £50 a year. He began writing his first works. Other pieces from this period include a draft of a play about a bishop, a monk, a woman accused of paganism by local shepherds, as well as love-poems and narrative lyrics on German knights; the early works were both conventional and, according to the critic Charles Johnston, "utterly unIrish", seeming to come out of a "vast murmurous gloom of dreams". Although Yeats's early works drew on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon tu
