The term “questionnaire,” as we use it today, emerged in the late nineteenth century, first in French and then in other European languages. 4 When Auden addressed Harvard, he contemplated what kinds of science and society were being produced through the mass-dissemination of these different types of questionnaire. Only a year before delivering his poem, he worked in Allied-occupied Germany for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, using interview “schedules” of about sixty-five questions to collect statistical data on the impact of bombing on “German morale.” 3 He had to “go round and ask the Germans how they felt about being bombed,” as one British investigator (James Stern) doing similar work later put it. 2 But Auden witnessed first-hand the more profound use of questionnaires to assist the post-war scientific management of the social and political spheres. The New York Times reported that “The Spring of 1927 will … be remembered as the time when an idea, born in the psychological laboratory, blossomed out into a popular and all-pervading pastime.” These “quizzes” and “tests” encouraged a popular obsession with trivia – with “matters interrogative but otherwise not necessarily important” – as both a form of entertainment (in competition with crossword puzzles) and also a way to measure the aptitude and intelligence of job applicants. Question-and-answer tests flooded the public sphere in the interwar years. Here he included different kinds of question-lists – questionnaires, tests, quizzes – that had taken root in science and society during his own lifetime. Auden objected to the expansion of institutions demanding “Useful Knowledge” and experts claiming the authority “To organise us” on the basis of new social and psychological techniques, epitomized by the questionnaire. While noting the war that had barely ended (“Raw veterans already train / As freshmen forces”), he warned against the new dangers of this moment. Auden (1907–1973) recited his poem “Under which Lyre” at Harvard University in the “Victory Commencement” ceremony, marking the return of both professors and students. The wider ramifications of the questionnaire – the assumptions which shaped it over time and the social and cultural effects of its use – were being debated by the mid-twentieth century in Europe and North America.