W. H. Auden to spend his summers with Auden in Austria. In 1972, Auden moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, while he continued to spend summers in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973, a few hours after giving a reading of his poems at the Austrian Society for Literature; his death occurred at the Altenburgerhof Hotel where he was staying overnight before his intended return to Oxford the next day. He was buried in Kirchstetten. Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length).
Duino Elegies 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". <poem> Tonight in China let