21 November Poetry Prompts for Your Next Poetic Venture

As the year comes to an end, with these November poetry prompts we find a new drive to write something fantastic enough that will warm this cold mood and revive our spirits again.

2026 is just two months away!

I have thus compiled a list of 21 poetry prompts for this November so that you can create some of your best poetry (and prose) as this year comes to an end.

What I like to do in these poetry prompts is not just write a bunch of aesthetic ideas and hope you make sense of them. I try to find instances in the whole of literature as we have it, from where you can interpret your own reading and write poems on them. Most of the poetry prompts down here would be quotes from books, poems, or other forms of literature (diary entries!) where you’ll be able to both find the author’s emotions and formulate your own.

But all poetry prompts here are connected in some way as November is connected to us, as the penultimate month, as time of endings and hopes for new beginnings. So, here’s November poetry prompts. Let’s get creating magic.

Looking for some inspiration? Check out this beautiful poem by Robert Frost.

November Poetry Prompts

• “I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow;” but I shall kill no albatross.” (Frankenstein, Mary Shelley) What ambitions are worth chasing till the end?
• “For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that — I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much — so very much to learn.” (Sylvia Plath)
• “To live is so startling it leaves little time for it her occupations.” (Emily Dickinson)
• “I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves sometimes without knowing why.” (The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky)
• “Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I.” (Hozier)
• “I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘ A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.” (The Age of Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre)
• “…to live without thinking.” (The Secret History, Donna Tartt)
• “Be strong, I say. You can do it. There are a million of us, all over the world, breathing like you tonight.” (The Sick Bag Song, Nick Cave)
• “Each time you happen to me all over again.” (The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton)
• “Let evening come. It it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.” (Jane Kenyon)
• “Recreate yourselves: and let this be your best creation.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
• “If I were fire, I would burn, if I were a woodcutter, I would strike. But I am a heart, and I love.” (The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis)
• “It was November — the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines.” (Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery)
• “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” (Mary Oliver)
• “Listen up — there’s no war that will end all wars.” (Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami)
• “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” (T. S. Eliot)
• “Feel, feel, I say — feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.” (Henry James)
• “I would like to live. I am going to live…I am giving myself up; I am letting everything collapse, and I will start all over again with something else.” (Diary of a Philosophy Student, Simone de Beauvoir)
• “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. […] I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. […] you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.” (From a letter of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf)
• “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” (Dylan Thomas)
• “I will go down with my colours flying.” (Virginia Woolf’s diary, her last entry dated 8th March, 1941, 20 days before she committed suicide)

November might be bittersweet. But you can make yourself happier. You can end this year on a beautiful note and give yourself something to look forward to for the next year.

Which ones of the above poetry prompts are you ready for writing poetry on? Tell us about it! Good luck writing!

Looking for more poetry prompts? Check out October’s!