Amis began his career as a poet long before he had published any fiction. His first poetry collection, Bright November, was published in 1947 by the Fortune Press whose owner, the notorious Reginald Ashley Caton, reappears as L. S. (Lazy Sod) Caton in Amis's first five novels, before being killed off in The Anti-Death League (1966). The real Caton was probably worse than his fictional counterpart. He dealt in property and pornography and the ironically titled Fortune Press was partly a tax dodge for his less respectable activities. It did, however, publish a number of respectable writers, including Roy Fuller, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, Alun Lewis and Amis's friend Philip Larkin who advised Amis to take his first collection to Caton.

Bright November is a stylistic hybrid. Amis is trying to find a poetic voice and he relies frequently upon other people's. His confident, unborrowed persona would not begin to appear until the 1950s. It features most prominently in his 1956 collection A Case of Samples and begins to change in A Look Round the Estate (1967). The latter was his final original collection. Collected Poems 1944–1979 appeared in 1979 and after the 1970s his poetic output was infrequent.

‘Letter to Elisabeth’ is effectively his first published poem. It is addressed to Elisabeth Simpson, a married woman with whom he began a two-year affair in 1942: Bright November is dedicated to her. The poem's style carries echoes of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and other poets of the 1930s. The metre and syntax recall passages from Eliot's Four Quartets. Like Eliot, Amis maintains a flexible, uneven version of the iambic pentameter, and he exhibits a cautious delicacy in the placing of noun and verb phrases within the structure of each line and across its enjambed relation to the next. At one point Amis slows the pace and contemplates both the meaning and the concrete actuality of the words.

The internal rhymes and repetitions both suspend and emphasize the sense of the language, and it is more than likely that when writing this Amis turned his eye and ear to the opening of section V of Eliot 's ‘Burnt Norton’.