It was Palmin Senior who's imbued his son with the love to the twin tradition of romantically rhetorical ode and 'rational', polite satire, prevalent at the time in the Russian poetry.

[3] Liodor Palmin professed more or less abstract democratic principles and had his political agenda described as 'amorphous', but never ceased praising 'fighting for freedom heroics' ("Rendes-Vous", 1865, "Eternal Lives", 1867) and expressed most ardent admiration for zealots and pioneers in social struggle.

[1] Palmin's poetry, having formed under the Iskra influence which mixed Nekrasov's "pathos of suffering" with Heine-derived "high-brow irony", amounted rarely to more than stilted and repetitive commentaries on contemporary issues.

In 1970s Palmin was enjoying his reputation of the "keeper of revolutionary traditions in Russian poetry" and continued to fiercely attack his "age – dumb, cheap and mercenary in spirit", along with "all-pervading egotism of a mob", the two common evils which could be withstood only by the enormous might of a Poet, as he saw it ("In Memory of Nekrasov").

[1] Later literary scholars agreed that Palmin has never been a master of sharp political criticism, his verse, full of hints and half-spoken implementations, used spacious declarative monologues, stylistic clichés and borrowed a lot from mythology.

According to Alexander Amfiteatrov, "Palmin had his own style of writing, his own imagery, his own temperament, what he lacked was an original concept and ideologically he's been always hanging behind his age, even if full of best intentions and all the right kinds of sensibilities.