The Ends of the Earth: The Arctic and Antarctic, Edited by Elizabeth Kolbert & Francis Spufford

On the Polaris Expedition, Budington and others drank, Tyson brooded, the carpenter went insane... and probably most of the men aboard drifted miserably toward paranoia." Perhaps no literature has chronicled madness, starvation, physical misery and death as doggedly as that of polar exploration. The Ends of the Earth, a handsome boxed two- volume set of often quirky writing on the Antarctic and Arctic, shows that while exploration is not polar literature's only theme, its glimmer is still discernible, a century later, in the best writing about the planet's cold regions.

The Arctic has a far longer human – and therefore literary – history. This this volume's editor, Elizabeth Kolbert, an award-winning US journalist and author of a book on climate change, has unearthed a few pleasing eccentricities. A highlight is the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen's "The Winter Night". Rather than a struggle for survival, Nansen's dreamy, meditative account charts the intense emotion felt for his ship, the dread elicited by the polar night, and the volatile landscape in which he and his men drifted in the winter of 1888, their ship locked in sea ice, although ironically so well-provisioned that "we shall have nothing to write about when we get home".

But even the rollicking account of a 1980s Greenlandic Christmas by a writer from (however implausibly) Togo, or the politically incorrect, hilarious 1938 account of a stay among the Inuit of northern Canada by a French aristocrat, cannot dislodge the pallor of despair that hangs around Arctic literature.

A doomed polar balloonist's tattered diary, found years after his death along with his body, has the haunting intensity of Sappho's fragments, and there is a typically baleful story by Jack London. London's contribution aside, it is strange how the fictional selections in both volumes seem garish and dishonest when set aside spartan accounts of ordeal.

Francis Spufford's commanding, literary introduction to his Antarctic volume bristles with insight into the continent's peculiar mystique. The Antarctic, he notes, was the Edwardian equivalent of outer space.

One hundred years later, despite tourism, the probings of science, and the international treaty system that governs it, the continent is still extraterrestrial, more another planet moored at the bottom of the earth than part of our world. Spufford's approach is less cosmopolitan than Kolbert's. He underpins his anthology with the (British) monuments of Antarctic literature, from Wilson to Shackleton, Cherry-Garrard to Scott (whose chastening final account of struggle and death is, he writes, the Antarctic's passion play), and with contemporary travel writing by relatively well-known UK-based authors.

These are not academically or historically definitive anthologies. Kolbert writes that her guiding principle was writerliness, of which there is plenty here. Why has there been so much superb writing on these relatively blank spaces? As both editors note, the struggle to define their mystique has compelled generations of writers to new heights of literary passion in order to fill the empty space, and to capture the cold voltage of their allure.

Here, literature was as significant to exploration as the sledges and the dogs: an intrinsic part of a quest which, writes the historian Glyn Williams, has become "almost mystical in nature, beyond reasonable explanation". "Why did you take this voyage?" Nansen writes, "My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence... Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?"

What is striking about the selections here is how polar landscapes can elicit a liturgical intensity. As Barry Lopez writes in his magisterial book Arctic Dreams, "this landscape is able to expose in startling ways the complacency of our thoughts about land in general". Even now, the Arctic and the Antarctic strip complacency from us.

These are austere, hunted, fatal environments, shackled now to a future mythology of melt and end. When faced with this gravest of pasts and futures, no wonder writers such as Jenny Diski or Sara Wheeler have been driven to counter it with sharp, vacuum-packed humour, dry as the crystal desert itself.

Now the poles have a new role, as thermometers of climate change: these anthologies commemorate the International Polar Year, a scientific endeavour which runs from from 2007-9. Writers captivated by them have a new mission in the form of "science writing", particularly in the Antarctic. There are some glaring omissions here (such as Stephen Pyne's awe-inspiring The Ice), although Spufford has to be congratulated for unearthing John Langone's ethnographic piece about blue-collar servicemen in the 1960s and 1970s Antarctic.

The new siren call to writers smitten by the poles is to chart the supreme vulnerability of these landscapes, and to reveal how their fragility has increased the purchase these regions hold on our imagination. Polar literature is an ongoing project to resolve the conundrum that, while there is "nothing there", all life – history, desire, courage, love – thrives in their icy expanse.

Jean McNeil was writer-in-residence in Antarctica in 2005-6 with the British Antarctic Survey

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