In the period following World War I, Župančič was frequently regarded as the greatest Slovenian poet after Prešeren,[2] but in the last forty years his influence has been declining and his poetry has lost much of its initial appeal.

[8] In the Austrian capital, he became acquainted with the contemporary currents in European art, especially the Viennese Secession and fin de siècle literature.

He also met with Ruthenian students from eastern Galicia who introduced him to Ukrainian folk poetry, which had an important influence on Župančič's future poetic development.

He started to publish his poetry in the liberal literary magazine Ljubljanski zvon, where he clashed with one of its editors and the most influential Slovene author of that time, Anton Aškerc.

[5] In 1912, the national liberal mayor of Ljubljana Ivan Tavčar employed him as the director of the City Archive, a post previously occupied by Župančič's former opponent, Anton Aškerc.

During the Italian Fascist and Nazi German partition and annexation of Slovenia in World War II, Župančič sympathized with the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People and wrote poems under different pseudonyms for underground communist journals.

All issues of Cankar's Erotika were bought by the Ljubljana Bishop Anton Bonaventura Jeglič and destroyed, and Župančič's Čaša opojnosti was condemned by the most renowned Slovene conservative thinker of the time, the neo-thomist philosopher Aleš Ušeničnik.

In his masterpiece Duma from 1908, the visions of an idyllic rural life and natural beauty are mixed with implicit images of social unrest, emigration, impoverishment, and economic decay of the contemporary agricultural society.

[19] The house was presented by Fran Saleški Finžgar, who led its arrangement into a museum, and Župančič read Prešeren's poem "O Vrba".

[21] The literary critic Josip Vidmar rejected Župančič's views in his well-known polemic book The Cultural Problem of Slovene Identity.

[22] After 2000, several interpretations of his poem "Zlato jabolko" (The Golden Apple), written in September 1943, were used in the polemic about Župančič's political position during the war and after it, precisely if he knew about the killing of around 12,000 members of the Slovenian Home Guard, an anti-communist militia that collaborated with the German army in the Summer 1945.

Numerous streets, public buildings, and institutions in Slovenia, Serbia (mostly in Autonomous Province of Vojvodina) as well as in Slovene-inhabited areas of Italy and Austria are named after him.