Umakeralam, his mahakavya, is a work of great devotion: devotion to the land, to the language, to a poetic tradition and to high moral values. He wrote, like Asan and Vallathol, a number of short narratives or khandakavyas, of which the most famous are Karanabhooshanam and Pingala. In the former he celebrates Karna's infinite generosity and dedication to principles. In the later he tries to portray the transformation of a courtesan overnight into a pious and refined character - almost a saint. Ulloor also wrote quite a large number of lyrics and shorter pieces, now available in various collections. They cover a wide range from eulogies to kings and friends to the poetry of social commitment (for example, arguing for Temple Entry for low-caste Hindus).

Ulloor was perhaps the most classical and the least romantic of the three poets. One could say either that the romantic in him was stifled by the authoritarian classicist or that the classicist in him was trying to pass for a romantic to suit the changing tastes of the time. It must be remembered that Ulloor was one of the first of our fullfledged poets to achieve the benefits of formal education to the post-graduate level from a University. He was thus exposed to the influence of English poetry through class-room instruction. Asan and Vallathol had only informal contact with English poetry. Neither of them could have, on the basis of their training, written a work like Ulloor's monumental History of Kerala Literature. But Asan through self-study and Vallathol partly by his native gift and partly through indirect channels, became imbued with the spirit of romanticism. All the three began as classicists, graduated into romanticism and finally peeped into realism. All of them wrote their best poems during the second phase. Ulloor cultivated the classical lyric with its were severe discipline over the structure and its ultimate didactic motivation. He could say with Wrodsworth that he was a teacher or nothing. But we know that in his best poems, Wordsworth could not keep up his declared intention of being a teacher. What was important was that the reader should be enabled to experience in full, the wonder and excitement that was the source of inspiration for the poem itself. Ulloor is interested not in the communication of that experience through the senses, but in distilling the abstract moral value of that experience. Thus even in his best lyrics he adds almost mechanically like Coleridge at the end of The Ancient Mariner, a moral. Being suspicious of his subjective evaluation, he would invoke some value approved of by the masters of the past. His master was Sri Harsha, not Kalidasa. Thus Annum Innum (Then and Now), after glorifying the past and visualizing a bright future in glowing, eloquent terms, he adds the last quatrain which is an exhortation to the people of India: "India will become the Paradise it was once, O Indians, if we, pure in body and mind, lift ourselves through hard work". The sensuous experience presented earlier does not, according to him, make it valid enough. There are times when Ulloor could rise to the heights of lyricism for short flights: in Bhoothakkannadi (Microscope) he writes: