Dr. Roper describes the mode of many of Dryden's original poems by redefining the royalism that provides the matter of some works and the metaphoric vocabulary of others. Dryden's royalism is seen both as an identifiable political attitude and a way of apprehending public life that again and again relates superficially non-political matters to the standards and assumptions of politics in order to determine their public significance.

Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms, first published in 1965, principally through readings of ten poems, comes to the conclusion that Dryden's poems are most successful when they work to create a meaningful analogy between such topics as literature and politics or between the constitution of England and the constitution of Rome, the Garden of Eden, or Israel under David.