Wit & Attitude Quote by Ezra Pound

A confession like this from Ezra Pound lands with the sour tang of damage control: blunt enough to sound honest, self-flattering enough to keep the speaker centered. The phrase "worst mistake" tries to reframe anti-Semitism as a personal miscalculation, not a moral stain with victims. He doesn’t say it was evil; he says it was "stupid" and "suburban" - adjectives that downgrade hatred into bad taste, like an embarrassing haircut or a small-town fashion. That’s the rhetorical sleight of hand: he disavows the prejudice while also insulating his self-image as the serious artist who merely slummed it in vulgar ideas.

Calling it "suburban" is especially loaded. Pound, the expatriate modernist who styled himself as cosmopolitan and razor-intelligent, casts anti-Semitism as something beneath his sophistication, a petty middle-class reflex rather than a coherent part of the fascist worldview he flirted with and broadcast in wartime Italy. It’s a revision that keeps the myth intact: the genius briefly contaminated by the banal.

The context matters because Pound wasn’t merely careless; he was publicly committed, using radio and prose to circulate conspiratorial, explicitly anti-Jewish claims alongside his economic obsessions. After the war, facing treason charges and confinement, he had every incentive to launder ideology into "prejudice", and responsibility into "mistake". The line reads less like repentance than an attempt to reclassify his record as an aesthetic lapse - a way to be forgiven without being fully accounted for.