Crane's example shows that one can offer a future-oriented, American vision in poetry, without severing the roots of English-language tradition; one can learn from the modernists, without assenting either to Eliot's world-weary outlook or to Pound's reactionary/futurist extremism.

From different angles, Crane's friends Tate & Winters both undermined his reputation after his death, accenting his weaknesses & failures. Those two, along with their southern "Agrarian" New Critical allies (Ransom et al.), laid the foundations for the cautious, conservative, Eliot-sponsored preciosity of early 50s poetry (Wilbur, et al.), which was what Lowell & the free-verse confessionals (along with the early "New Americans") were reacting against. I suppose one could say that Lowell "broke the pentameter", again. But Crane had shown, earlier, than one didn't have to break the pentameter (contra Pound).