 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.
