In The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth, a zany noir spoof of Raymond Chandler, Malcolm Pryce has his private eye, Louie Knight, buy a ticket to Nantyronen that includes 'admission to the Iago Prytherch “home-stay”'. Having reached his destination, he is guided by signs such as 'You are now entering Iago Prytherch Country' and 'The bald Welsh hills' to the hovel ('Warning: spittled mirth') where Iago himself huddles. Parody of this order is an inverted tribute to the power of the early R. S. Thomas to recreate the human and physical landscape of rural, upland Wales in the very image of his own obsession. He gave that obsession a name, Iago Prytherch, and a local habitation, Prytherch country, as broodingly mapped as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

If Dylan Thomas was the definitive poetic talent of pre-Second World War Wales, then it was this other Thomas, culturally, politically and poetically his polar opposite, who became the defining poetic talent of post-war decades. It is therefore with a shock that one realises that R. S., who fully blossomed only after Dylan's death in 1953, was in fact a year older than his namesake. But whereas the quintessential South Walian was a prodigy, who had completed a corpus of remarkable lyrics by the age of eighteen, the North Walian was by his own admission a late developer, both as a poet and as a man, an emotional retardation he blamed on his snobbishly genteel mother's possessiveness. And while his poetic development was impeded by his lingering attachment to the variously Romantic poems in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, he saw it, too, as ultimately deriving from the immature sensibility cultivated in him by her. Iago was therefore the tutelary spirit not only of a breakthrough poetry but also of a personal maturation that took the form of a narcissistic adult's belated encounter with the Reality Principle.

Emyr Humphreys's lifelong work as a novelist has largely consisted of a resolute expansion of this unintentional geopolitical ‘joke’, at the expense of those of his readers who, like Lars, grow increasingly incredulous. How, they object, can an area of Britain that is itself routinely described and treated as a ‘region’ possibly claim to have regions of its own? Isn't the term ‘region’ (generously upgraded on sensitive occasions to ‘principality’) good enough for it? Doesn't Wales realise that to be recognised as a region is in itself a considerable achievement, a significant concession granted by a notoriously centralist British state? The splitting of the political atom, the supposedly irreducible unit of the British nation-state, has caused trouble enough in itself. It really is preposterous to hear that Wales, the new irreducible unit, the veritable quark of the British political system, now regards itself as internally divided, and diverse.

There are some who will no doubt feel that such remarks are perfectly reasonable, and prominent among them will presumably be those who indignantly regard the word ‘region’ as being an innocent geographical expression, totally above political suspicion.

“Must not worry about George, for I hope the worst is over - must keep up a stout heart.”This jotting from Whitman's notebooks early in 1863 is a vivid reminder of the person around whom, for Whitman and his family, the whole of the Civil War seemed to revolve for the full four years of its duration. A great deal of attention has by now been paid to everyone and everything else that was of central concern to Whitman at this time. His fierce commitment to the Union cause; his boundless admiration for Lincoln; above all, his tender yet invigorating care for the sick soldiers in general and the complex passion of his attachment to a few individuals in particular - all these matters have been extensively studied, not only for the insights they offer into Whitman's character but also for the light they throw on his poetry. By contrast, Whitman's wartime connection with his younger brother George (who was thirty-two when he entered the army, to the poet's forty-two) has been treated as at best a relatively minor matter of merely biographical interest. On closer examination, however, this fraternal relationship begins to assume much greater significance. Indeed, it could be argued that it was at least partly through George that Whitman was led to an intimate understanding of the real, hidden nature of the war, and that it was around George that Whitman was able (perhaps unconsciously) to arrange several of those imaginative configurations that articulated his hopes and anxieties and that supplied the deep structure of his war poetry.