 Rilke 's work , and specifically , the Duino Elegies have been claimed as a deep influence by several poets and writers , including Galway Kinnell , Sidney Keyes , Stephen Spender , Robert Bly , W. S. Merwin , John Ashbery , novelist Thomas Pynchon and philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hans @-@ Georg Gadamer . Critics and scholars have discussed Pynchon ’ s use of Rilke ’ s lyricism and concepts of transformation in his novel Gravity 's Rainbow . The first lines of Gravity 's Rainbow mirror the first lines of first elegy , portraying the screaming descent of a V @-@ 2 rocket in 1944 London , and the novel has been described as a " serio @-@ comic variation on Rilke 's Duino Elegies and their German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture . " The British poet W. H. Auden ( 1907 – 1973 ) has been described as " Rilke 's most influential English disciple " and he frequently " paid homage to him " or used the imagery of angels in his work . In the 1936 poem cycle Sonnets from China , Auden directly alluded to Rilke 's writing of the Duino Elegies . 
