Roy,
Challenging folk to play your games is tiresome. But were GK to have posted the two versions for comment, I'd vote for the second, and I suspect that the second was the one he settled for as well, as it fits with the sense of his words. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.
However, claiming a shared wisdom for any stage of life, and moreover, speaking for all of your generation, is, respectively, incorrect and presumptuous. There will always be folk, of any generation, who either failed to get the memo, or else did and respectfully disagree, and moreover will get ticked off if others presume to speak for them. Or at least I know that this is the case with myself whenever anyone presumes to speak for me by dint of a shared birthday.
I do agree that the right choice is always the author's choice, but there are sometimes editorial decisions that take place after the fact. For example, with Dickinson's "The Snake" above, in Dickinson's original manuscript, where the standard textbook version today is "child," she had chosen the word "boy."
I prefer Dickinson's original, both because of the better music of "boy and barefoot" than "child and barefoot" and because it makes it clearer of her writing in persona, rather than the automatic assumption of all poetry being autobiography. However, I'm certain that the editor -- aside from changing her funky, nonstandard punctuation that might weird out some readers -- knew that there would be all sorts of people who would be freaked out by the gender-bending of a woman writing from a male perspective (these people exist even today) and it might be easier for more folk to identify with (and not cause gender-perspective discussions) the universal unisex word "child" instead.
There's also a matter of editors doing the "pee on it so it smells like them" maneuver and authors choosing to live with this because they'd rather have something published with trivial changes than sitting in a drawer unsold exactly as they conceived of it. If the poem by GK was published in the first version, I strongly suspect that those stanza breaks were the work of some tin-eared copy editor or layout designer.
I know I've certainly had that sort of copyeditor muck with pages of my fiction.
[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited March 13, 2005).]
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