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 Bronze Horseman (poem) concerned with the profoundest issues which confront humanity”. He concludes that if the poem is to be labeled a national epic, it is a "highly idiosyncratic" one. Several critics have suggested that the immediate inspiration for "The Bronze Horseman" was the work of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Before beginning work on "The Bronze Horseman", Pushkin had read Mickiewicz's "Forefathers' Eve" (1823–32), which contains a poem entitled "To My Muscovite Friends", a thinly-veiled attack on Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky for their failure to join the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825. "Forefather's Eve" contains poems where Peter I is described as