Dylan Kenny

Dylan Kenny’s research traces the intersections of early Greek poetry and philosophy, both in the forms of these texts and in the conditions of their production. As part of this research, he also investigates the long history of scholarship and reception that has helped to determine our own conceptions of the relationship between poetry and philosophy in antiquity.

His first book, The Harvest of Wisdom: Inquiry and Authority in Pindar’s Poetry, situates Pindar’s work against an expanded field of fifth-century speculative thought, including domains like natural philosophy, medicine, political thought, and rhetoric. Contrary to the long-standing image of Pindar as an archaic anachronism in his own century, it nominates Pindar as a crucial yet overlooked guide to contests of cultural authority in an era of intellectual ferment.

In addition, he maintains a research interest in the reception of ancient poetry in twentieth-century art and thought: current projects in this area include a study of gnomic plenitude in Bacchylides and Maurice Blanchot and an essay on beginnings and the “archaic” in Robert Duncan.