Carl Sandburg, the Chicago poet and newspaperman, spent much of his career chronicling the working-class life that genteel verse preferred to ignore. Before he earned fame, he had worked as a laborer and a journalist, and his sympathies stayed with ordinary men and women. “Questionnaire” arrives as a series of restless self-interrogations, a kind of secular confession tailored to an age of boom, inequality, and public moral posturing. Written in the years between the world wars, when factory fortunes climbed and the poor still waited in breadlines, the poem belongs to Sandburg’s larger project of holding American democracy to its own promises. Its power comes not from pointing outward at corruption but from turning the finger inward and asking whether the speaker—and by extension the reader—has quietly fed the machine.
Each question tests a different kind of integrity. The opening asks whether he has demanded dishonesty from another person “for my sake.” The next grows more concrete, pairing the image of selling ice to the poor in summer and coal to the poor in winter with daughters who nursed “brindle bull terriers” and dressed them in “plaid wool jackets.” That jarring contrast suggests that profit taken from the poor can become absurd luxury for someone else. The central idea is that moral failure rarely arrives as a dramatic crime; it accumulates in small, self-justifying choices—what one sells, what one refuses to hear, how loudly one advertises virtue.
Sandburg builds the poem almost entirely from anaphora, the repetition of “Have I” at the start of each section. This creates a relentless rhythm, like a checklist read aloud before sleep. There is no regular meter or rhyme, true to Sandburg’s free-verse style, but the cadence of the long question lines pulls against the brevity of “Have I been a bum listener?” That short, slang-heavy question lands hard because it follows more formal phrasing. The language is deliberately plain; words such as “snootful of booze,” “bum listener,” and “earful” root the moral inquiry in everyday speech rather than pulpit rhetoric.
Two sets of images organize the poem. Cold and cloth echo through coal, ice, “plaid wool jackets,” and “wool in my own ears,” linking physical comfort with moral deafness. The phrase “dollars from the living and the unborn” stretches exploitation across generations, while “retributions that shadow the heels of the dishonest” gives wrongdoing an almost ghostly consequence, following just behind. Then Sandburg shifts to visibility: “Have I done any good under cover? Or have I always put it in the show windows and the newspapers?” Here “show windows” makes charity sound like merchandise displayed for praise, and the title “Questionnaire” becomes quietly ironic: a form meant to gather data cannot contain this kind of private reckoning.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to offer an easy verdict. Sandburg does not answer any of the questions. The absence of answers turns the poem into a mirror rather than a sermon. Asking “Have I put wool in my own ears when men tried to tell me what was good for me?” admits that self-deception is a live possibility. Readers are not allowed to feel comfortably accused or comfortably innocent. Instead, the questions create a shared unease. That is why their plainness survives: they turn social criticism into private conscience, insisting that the health of a democracy rests on ordinary people asking what exactly they have sold, ignored, or performed for applause. In an age of self-promotion, the poem’s final question about doing good under cover still stings.