As the only predator that naturally hunts humans, the polar bear was seen as a fascinating emblem of the adverse Arctic from the early days of the first European expeditions. The animal, ‘with dangling ice all horrid, stalks forlorn’ through the wintry spaces of James Thomson’s poetic cycle The Seasons. Its home is ‘where winter wraps the polar world in snow,’ in Oliver Goldsmith’s evocative words, and where, as William Cowper puts it in his poem on Greenland, ‘winter arm’d with terrors, here unknown, / Sits absolute on his unshaken throne.’ This talk will examine the critically neglected reception of the polar bear and its ice-locked habitat in eighteenth-century English literature by placing it against the backdrop of contemporary travel accounts and visual resources. In the story of the neoclassical polar bear and northern winter, Denmark features as an important link between England and Greenland. Special attention will therefore be given to Copenhagen, where captive polar bears swam in Øresund and where the English poet Ambrose Philips penned his accomplished winter-piece during a particularly harsh winter of 1709.

Ivana Bicak is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University in Turkey. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds, with a focus on eighteenth-century English poetry. Her research interests include the interplay of early modern poetry and science as well as Roman literature. Her first monograph, currently with Oxford University Press, deals with early modern English and Latin poetry on the horrific and delightful aspects of contemporary science, including nature collections, animal experiments, blood transfusion trials, and extraterrestrials. She has published articles in Milton Quarterly, The Seventeenth Century, Renaissance Studies, Social History of Medicine, and Studies in Philology.