In school, Emin met Armenia's leading poet Yegishe Charents, who died in 1937 in a Soviet prison.

Edmond Y. Azadian, in the Afterword to For You on New Year's Day, suggests that Emin freed Armenian poetry "from the restrictions that followed Charents' time, the bleak Stalin era," reinvigorating it after a long period during which experimentalism had been discouraged.

Martin Robbins suggests, in Ararat Quarterly, that his poetry reflects "the tough compression of an engineer's mathematically trained mind," and cites as a representative example his poem "Small" in which he acknowledges the defenselessness of the Armenian people but affirms their strength.

His American experience reflected in some of his later poems, published in Land, Love, Century, including Gravestone in a Negro Cemetery, First Night in New York, and In the Streets of Boston.

In Poland's long struggle for independence and national identity, he identified some of his own feelings about Armenia and he has hailed "the proud spirit of the Polish people, their fanatical attachment to their land, language, literature, tradition."