Elizabeth Bishop, on holiday in Brazil in 1958, sent a postcard to Robert Lowell that consisted of eleven words. The eleven words are better than most paragraphs Lowell wrote that year. They describe, in plain English, what the light looked like off a particular bay at six in the morning.
She did not return to the image in any of her published poems.
The postcard is the most undervalued prose form of the last century. It is short. It is exposed. It is written in a hurry, on a small piece of card, often standing up at a counter, and it is read by everyone who handles it between the writer and the recipient.
These constraints have produced, again and again, sentences that the same writers could not produce at length.
The postcard's history as a literary form is mostly accidental. The first picture postcards were a German innovation of the late 1860s. They were intended as cheap commercial communication. By the 1890s they were a craze. By 1910, in Britain alone, eight hundred million postcards a year were being sent.
Most of those were forgettable. A small fraction were extraordinary.
The constraint of space is the obvious force. A postcard has, depending on the era and design, between forty and one hundred and twenty words of writing space. The writer cannot develop an argument. She can only state. The form rewards specificity and punishes abstraction.
The constraint of exposure is more interesting. A letter is sealed. A postcard is not. Anyone who handles it can read it. Postmen, family members, hotel clerks, the people sorting mail at the central office in the city of destination — all of them are potential readers.
This produces a particular tone. The postcard cannot say what a letter can say. It cannot be intimate in the way a letter is intimate. It must, instead, find a third register: a tone that is private without being confessional, particular without being secret.
Some writers were better at this than others.
Wallace Stevens, on his insurance company's business in Cuba in the late 1920s, sent his wife a series of postcards now held at the Huntington Library. They are almost all about weather. They are not, by any standard, romantic. They are precise about wind direction and cloud height. They are also, read across the series, one of the most sustained acts of attention by a major American poet to a single climate.
Stevens kept the postcards in his head. They show up later, transmuted, in the poems.
Virginia Woolf was, by contrast, a bad postcard writer. Her postcards are too long for the space, written in a cramped hand around the edges, and they read like letters that have been amputated. Her best epistolary work is in the sealed envelope.
Edward Thomas, the British poet who died at Arras in 1917, wrote postcards from the front that are almost unbearable in their plainness. Have had tea. Trench dry today. Saw a hare. The constraint of the form, here amplified by the constraint of military censorship, produced sentences that survive ninety years later because they refuse to do anything but state.
The form survived, with diminished frequency, into the postwar era. The American poet James Schuyler was a serious postcard correspondent through the 1960s and 1970s, sending hundreds to John Ashbery and others. His postcards are funnier than his poems. They are also, occasionally, sharper.
Schuyler's rule, stated in a letter to a friend in 1971, was that a postcard should contain one image, one sentence about the writer, and one question. He almost always followed it.
The form did not survive email well. The digital equivalent of the postcard is, in theory, the text message. But the text message is private and instantaneous. It lacks both the exposure and the delay that gave the postcard its particular discipline.
Some writers have continued the practice anyway. The British essayist Lucy Brock, in a small book published in 2024, collected forty postcards she had sent to a friend over a single year of travel. The book is fifty-three pages long. It is one of the more interesting prose objects of recent years.
Brock's argument, in a short afterword, is that the postcard forced her to look. She had to choose, in any city she passed through, one image worth describing. She had to fit the description on a card. The card had to be addressed and stamped and put in a box.
The looking, she suggests, is the writing. Everything else is logistics.
It seems worth saying, finally, that the postcard is still available. Stationers sell them. Post offices still accept them. They cost very little. Most of us no longer send them.
We have, for the most part, lost the habit. We have probably also lost some prose.