Contact:  Rick Peterson, Manager of News Services, 414/832-6590
For Immediate Release						April 9, 1997

Poet Ezra Pound's Wartime Incarceration Subject of Lawrence University Lecture


	APPLETON, WIS. Ñ Acclaimed American poet Ezra Pound and his
controversial criticism of U.S. policy during World War II will be discussed
Monday, April 14 in a Lawrence University Main Hall Forum. 

	Appleton native, Lawrence graduate and associate professor of English
at the University of Tulsa Robert Spoo returns to his hometown to deliver the
address, "Researching Treason:  The Incarceration of Ezra Pound," at 4:15 p.m.
in Main Hall Room 109.  The lecture is free and open to the public.  

	Spoo will explore Pound's experiences as a prisoner following his
arrest in May, 1945 on charges of treason against the U.S. for broadcasts over
Rome Radio critical of the U.S. and Allied war effort.  While Pound maintained
his comments were made as a freely dissenting American, he was held in a U.S.
Army detention camp outside Pisa, Italy, for six months before being sent to
Washington, D.C.  Found mentally unfit by a federal jury, his case never went
to trial. 

	 Drawing on FBI and Justice Department documents, Spoo is finishing a
manuscript based on nearly 150 letters written by Pound and his wife, Dorothy,
during his arrest and incareration.  The previously unpublished letters shed
new light on Pound's life and his politics. 

  	Editor-in-chief of the James Joyce Quarterly, Spoo has been a member of
the English department at the University of Tulsa since 1988.  After graduating
magna cum laude from Lawrence in 1979, he earned his master's and doctoral
degrees at Princeton University.