In his book collecting as in his poetry, William Drummond was conservative and imitative. As reported in Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (1842), Jonson said that Drummond's verses were good, "Save that they smelled too much of the Schools, and were not after the fancie of the time." In an undated letter to Dr. Arthur Johnston, Drummond expressed his objections to innovations in poetry:

In vain have some Men of late (Transformers of every Thing) consulted upon her Reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities, denuding her of her own Habits, and those Ornaments with which she has amused the world some Thousand Years. . . . What is not like the ancient and conform to those rules which hath been agreed unto by all Times, may (indeed) be something like unto Poetry but it is no more Poetry than a Monster...