by Charles Bernstein
Sappho is too cerebral
Lao Tse cannot be categorized
Buddha is the real thing
Confucius does not communicate
Homer is a witch
Heraclitus no longer has affect
Aeschylus is easy
Sophocles communicates
Euripides is too emotional
Socrates is a fake
Aristophanes is too emotional
Isocrates is a fake
Plato is not emotional enough
Diogenes is morally repugnant
Aristotle cannot be categorized
Longinus is abstract
Epicurus is not emotional
Cicero is rhetorical
Julius Caesar is elitist
Lucretius is not emotional enough
Catullus is hypocritical
Virgil is a sycophant
Ovid is solipsistic
Jesus is the real thing
St. Augustine is morally repugnant
Maimonides is difficult
Thomas Aquinas is difficult
Guido Cavalcanti is elitist
Cimabue is heartless
Dante loves God
Giotto cannot be categorized
Petrarch is a conformist
Chaucer is misunderstood
Brunelleschi brought me to tears
Van Eyck lacks heart
Fra Angelico is too emotional
Leon Battista Alberti is spiritual
Piero Della Francesca is psychedelic
Crivelli is dogmatic
Memling is artless
Botticelli is enmeshed in fantasy
Lorenzo de Medici is hypocritical
Bosch is awkward
Mantegna is perfect
Leonardo da Vinci is too emotional
Savonarola is too cerebral
Skelton is dogmatic
Machiavelli is affimative
Erasmus is not emotional enough
Michelangelo is morally repugnant
Titian is a barrel of laughs
Giorgione is sincere
Thomas Moore is heartless
Montezuma is a witch
Raphael swings
Luther leaves me wanting more
Cortes is affirmative
Rabelais is cynical
Correggio is trendy
Holbein is not emotional enough
Bronzino is abstract
Wyatt is not affirmative
Surrey is free of dogma
Parmigiano does not conform
Montaigne is contradictory
St. John of the Cross suffers fools gladly
Cervantes is a fake
Spencer has affect
Sidney is accessible
Annibale Carraci is narcissistic
Bacon is riddled with riddles
Dowland is a real human being
Marlowe is heartless
Shakespeare is delusional
Galileo has a Jewish cast of mind
Caravaggio is not emotional enough
Monteverdi is humble
Campion is too ideological
Donne makes sense
Ben Johnson is too cerebral
Guido Reni is a nihilist
Rubens is compliant
Herrick is incomprehensible
George Herbert is perfectly clear
Descartes is too cerebral
Poussin has affect
Van Dyck shows courage
Cromwell is enmeshed in fantasy
Velásquez is a conformist
Rembrandt is defiant
Milton is too ideological
Bradstreet is sincere
Corneille is not affirmative
Andrew Marvell is a formalist
La Fontaine is universal
Blaise Pascal is not spiritual enough
Dryden is free of ideology
Spinoza is too cerebral
Locke is humorless
Vermeer is hallucinatory
Racine is ironic
Newton is anthropocentric
Edward Taylor is idealistic
Leibniz is queasy
Cotton Mather is misanthropic
Swift is too cerebral
Vico is emotionless
Watteau is racist
Handel is a fake
Bach is perfect
Scarlatti is dated
Bishop Berkeley is the real thing
Pope is fairly androgynous
Richardson is clumsy
Jonathan Edwards is a fake
Fielding is too spiritual
Samuel Johnson is ideological
David Hulme is a fairy
Diderot is not emotional enough
Laurence Sterne is clownish
Thomas Gray is a drunk
William Collins is precarious
Rousseau is free of ideology
Smollett expresses a female point of view
Kant leaves me cold
Moses Mendelssohn has a Jewish cast of mind
Oliver Goldsmith is professional
Cowper is a coward
Fragonard is inconsistent
James Macpherson is arrogant
Tom Paine is ethically challenged
Goya is narcissistic
Jacques-Louis David is disappointing
Goethe misses the point
Crabbe is hyperbolic
Burns is adolescent
Danton loves God
Blake is a careerist
Napoleon is a hooligan
Wordsworth is affirmative
Hegel is shallow
Hölderlin is tendentious
Walter Scott is misunderstood
Coleridge is mired in fantasy
Jane Austen is cynical
Schopenhauer is cynical
Byron is uncompelling
Shelley is an intellectual thug
Turner is a nonconformist
John Clare is elitist
Keats is seductive
Thomas Carlyle is deep
Thomas Hood is emotional
Emerson is almost perfect
Hawthorne is hopeless
Mill is soporific
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is pessimistic
Longfellow plays it safe
Whittier does not suffer fools
Felix Mendelssohn is intense
Darwin is transcendent
Tennyson is sentimental
Poe is a formalist
Dickens is not affirmative
Browning is nonsensical
Edward Lear is silly
Büchner is absurd
Kierkegaard is abstract
Trollope it too analytic
Thoreau is sardonic
Marx is adorable
Emily Bronte no longer has affect
Melville swings
Whitman is gibberish
Ruskin is too cerebral
Baudelaire is a dandy
Dostoevsky is a monster
Matthew Arnold is riveting
Dante Rossetti is too decorative
Tolstoy is affirmative
Dickinson is confused
Christina Rossetti is a fake
Lewis Carroll brought me to tears
William Morris loves God
Twain is defiant
Swinburne is joyless
Thomas Hardy is not spiritual
William James is cliquish
Mallarmé is a fake
Henry James takes risks
Hopkins does not have a Jewish cast of mind
Nietzsche is degenerate
Lautrémont is a witch
Van Gough is solipsistic
Rimbaud is frivolous
Wilde has affect
Freud is sarcastic
Conrad is incorrigible
Housman is exemplary
Yeats is ambiguous
Dowson is morally repugnant
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