Aging & Wisdom Quote by Wilfred Owen

A blade sharpened by disgust: Owen’s line isn’t really about literacy rates, it’s about a society that has stopped taking its own “wisdom” seriously. “Numbers of the old people cannot read” lands like a census fact, cold and bureaucratic, the kind of phrasing that mimics official reports. Then he twists it: “Those who can seldom do.” The pivot is the sting. Even the elders who possess the skill rarely exercise it, suggesting not only deprivation but a kind of cultural surrender - the habit of not seeking out words, ideas, evidence.

Owen wrote from the vantage point of a young soldier watching institutions fail in real time. World War I wasn’t just a slaughter; it was an industrial system that ate bodies while governments and newspapers manufactured meaning. In that atmosphere, the “old people” aren’t merely grandparents; they are the keepers of conventional authority - the respectable public, the voters, the sermon-hearers, the people presumed to have steadiness and perspective. Owen’s implication is brutal: age doesn’t guarantee insight, and experience can harden into incuriosity.

The subtext is also about power. Illiteracy (and chosen non-reading) keeps people governable; it limits the ability to question propaganda, to encounter dissent, to connect private grief to public responsibility. By blaming the old, Owen isn’t scoring a generational dunk so much as indicting a nation that sent the young to die while the old, unable or unwilling to read, kept accepting the story they were handed.