Paradise Lost temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men". In his introduction to the Penguin edition of "Paradise Lost", the Milton scholar John Leonard notes, "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published Paradise Lost in 1667. The biographer John Aubrey (1626–97) tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. However, parts were almost certainly written earlier, and its roots lie in Milton's earliest youth." Leonard speculates that the
The Eve of St. Agnes revealed in the poem's final stanza and the beadsman, "after thousand aves told, / For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold". Rudyard Kipling's short story "Wireless" (1902) has the narrator witnessing a recreation of the poem by a man in a trance who, by virtue of the similarities of his situation to that of Keats (he is a consumptive apothecary's assistant), becomes "tuned" to the poet. Four lines from the final stanza of Keats' poem form the motto of H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 story "The Outsider". The Eve of St. Agnes The Eve of St. Agnes is a