"Färjesång" (1941), a finely expressed blend of romanticism, surrealism, and the dark clouds of the ongoing Second World War spelled a mark of maturity and would influence later Swedish poets, as would Ekelöf's debut over time. From this point on, his transformations of style and imagery, his deep familiarity with a wide array of literary idioms, stretching far beyond modern writing, and an almost Bob Dylan-like propensity to make fresh departures in his writing and challenge critics' readings of his work in order to keep true to it, made him one of the most influential and, in time, widely read of Scandinavian modernist poets, a kind of father figure and challenging and inspiring model for many later writers not just in Sweden but also in Denmark and Norway. He has been translated into many languages and is a classic of 20th-century Swedish poetry.