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
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (poem) Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (poem) "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is an ecphrastic poem by the 20th-century American poet William Carlos Williams that was written in response to "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", traditionally attributed to Pieter Bruegel. Williams first published the poem as part of a sequence in "The Hudson Review" in 1960, subsequently using the sequence as the basis for his final book, "Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems", published in 1962. The poem, as indicated by the title, touches upon the Greek tragedy of Icarus, the story in which Icarus, the son of