Likewise, Arthur Golding moralized his own translation of the full 15 books, and published it in 1567. This version was the same version used as a supplement to the original Latin in the Tudor-era grammar schools that influenced such major Renaissance authors as Christopher Marlowe and william Shakespeare. Many non-English authors were heavily influenced by Ovid's works as well. Montaigne, for Example, alluded to Ovid several times in his Essais, specifically in his comments on Education of Children when he says:

In Spain, Ovid is both praised and criticized by Cervantes in his Don Quixote where he warns against satires that can exile poets, as happened to Ovid. In the 16th century, Ovid's works were criticized in England. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered that a contemporary translation of Ovid's love poems be publicly burned in 1599. The Puritans of the following century viewed Ovid as pagan, thus as an immoral influence.

Some commentators have also noted the influence of Ovid's interest in love elegy in his other works, such as the Fasti, and have distinguished his "elegiac" style from his "epic" style. Richard Heinze in his famous Ovids elegische Erzählung (1919) delineated the distinction between Ovid's styles by comparing the Fasti and Metamorphoses versions of the same legends, such as the treatment of the Ceres–Proserpina story in both poems. Heinze demonstrated that, "whereas in the elegiac poems a sentimental and tender tone prevails, the hexameter narrative is characterized by an emphasis on solemnity and awe..." His general line of argument has been accepted by Brooks Otis, who wrote:

In 1923, scholar J. J. Hartman proposed a theory that is little considered among scholars of Latin civilization today: that Ovid was never exiled from Rome and that all of his exile works are the result of his fertile imagination. This theory was supported and rejected in the 1930s, especially by Dutch authors.

In the 16th century, some Jesuit schools of Portugal cut several passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. While the Jesuits saw his poems as elegant compositions worthy of being presented to students for educational purposes, they also felt his works as a whole might corrupt students. The Jesuits took much of their knowledge of Ovid to the Portuguese colonies. According to Serafim Leite (1949), the ratio studiorum was in effect in Colonial Brazil during the early 17th century, and in this period Brazilian students read works like the Epistulae ex Ponto to learn Latin grammar.

In 1985, a research paper by Fitton Brown advanced new arguments in support of the theory. The article was followed by a series of supports and refutations in the short space of five years. Among the reasons given by Brown are: that Ovid's exile is only mentioned by his own work, except in "dubious" passages by Pliny the Elder and Statius, but no other author until the 4th century; that the author of Heroides was able to separate the poetic "I" of his own and real life; and that information on the geography of Tomis was already known by Virgil, by Herodotus and by Ovid himself in his Metamorphoses.

The fourth book has ten poems addressed mostly to friends. Poem 1 expresses his love of poetry and the solace it brings; while 2 describes a triumph of Tiberius. Poems 3–5 are to friends, 7 a request for correspondence, and 10 an autobiography.

Ovid has been seen as taking on a persona in his poetry that is far more emotionally detached from his mistress and less involved in crafting a unique emotional realism within the text than the other elegists. This attitude, coupled with the lack of testimony that identifies Ovid's Corinna with a real person has led scholars to conclude that Corinna was never a real person—and that Ovid's relationship with her is an invention for his elegiac project. Some scholars have even interpreted Corinna as a metapoetic symbol for the elegiac genre itself.

John Dryden composed a famous translation of the Metamorphoses into stopped rhyming couplets during the 17th century, when Ovid was "refashioned [...] in its own image, one kind of Augustanism making over another." The Romantic movement of the 19th century, in contrast, considered Ovid and his poems "stuffy, dull, over-formalized and lacking in genuine passion." Romantics might have preferred his poetry of exile.

The picture Ovid among the Scythians, painted by Delacroix, portrays the last years of the poet in exile in Scythia, and was seen by Baudelaire, Gautier and Edgar Degas. Baudelaire took the opportunity to write a long essay about the life of an exiled poet like Ovid. This shows that the exile of Ovid had some influence in 19th century Romanticism since it makes connections with its key concepts such as wildness and the misunderstood genius.