One of the great achievements of modern literary studies has been the rediscovery of rhetoric. Thanks to the work of such scholars as E. R. Curtius, E. Faral, and B. Munteano we now know that rhetoric was a great formative influence on writers of all kinds from Virgil and Ovid to the generation of Goethe, Byron, and Stendhal. Although Romantic aesthetics programmatically rejected any external literary form in favour of spontaneous utterance, writers continued to use rhetoric, and its influence persisted well into this century. As a system teaching the art of composition and self-expression, rhetoric profoundly influenced poetry, drama, non-fictional prose works (history, philosophy, autobiography), religious poetry and prose (prayers, sermons). As the first fully developed aesthetic system it also affected ancient theories of art, and in the great period of its revival in early modern Europe, from 1400 to 1800, it was very influential in the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), and in both the composing and performing of music. For English literature its high point of influence was in the 150 years between the Elizabethan writers and the Augustans. A knowledge of rhetoric is indispensable to understanding not only the forms taken by literature in this period but also the motives behind composition, the writer's attitude to both his material and his readers.