culture, Rilke is frequently quoted or referenced in television programs, motion pictures, music and other works when these works discuss the subject of love or angels. Rilke's works have also been appropriated for use by the New Age community and in self-help books, and he has been reinterpreted "as a master who can lead us to a more fulfilled and less anxious life". Rilke's work, and specifically, the Duino Elegies have influenced many poets, including Galway Kinnell, Sidney Keyes, John Ashbery, and W. H. Auden. The novelist Thomas Pynchon novel Gravity's Rainbow shows echoes of Rilke; its first lines mirror the first lines of the first elegy, with a "sound [that] is [the] scream of a V-2 rocket hitting London in 1944"; and The New York Times reviewer of Gravity's Rainbow wrote that, "the book could be read as a serio-comic variation on Rilke's Duino Elegies and their German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture". Rilke's Duino Elegies influenced Hans-Georg Gadamer's theories of hermeneutics—understanding how an observer (i.e. reader, listener, or viewer) interprets cultural artifacts (i.e. works of literature, music, or art) as a series of distinct encounters. Gadamer saw Rilke as a philosophical poet whose work reveals the limits of human comprehension. He argues that the alienation of the contemporary world stands as an obstacle to making sense of such encounters. According to Gadamer, Rilke's point toward how to approach those limits, by making these part of ourselves interpretation and reinterpretation can we address the existential problems of humanity's significance and impermanence. References and notes Notes References Sources Books Journals Newspapers Online sources Primary Sources See also List of Duino Elegies Translations External links The Duino Elegies in German The Duino Elegies on Poemist Download of a recitation by Irene Laett: Begin of the First Elegie in German 1912 poems 1922 poems 1923 books Austrian books Poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke