21 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Edgar Allan Poe wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
Edgar Allan Poe's real sentences are grim enough that the invented ones have to work hard to out-do them — and they try. A line enters this collection only when its wording is verified against the printed works: the poems and essays in their standard texts, and the letters in their published editions.
The internet's favorite fake Poe line is documented below, next to what he actually wrote.
A sentence linked to Edgar Allan Poe may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
A full-text search across Poe's works and published letters finds nothing like this sentence. It circulates over his name without a citation; the sentiment is modern, and so is the phrasing.
All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, / Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore,— / Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!” / Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.
These many pieces are yet one book.
We have put her living in the tomb!
I had swooned, and Peters had caught me as I fell.
The more earnestly I struggled not to think, the more intensely vivid became my conceptions, and the more horribly distinct.
If what I have written is to circulate at all, I am naturally anxious that it should circulate as I wrote it.
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies
But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.
Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain.
It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow.
He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.
Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained.
Truth is not always in a well.
The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.
They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse.
In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred,' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before.'
Our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound.
Every book with a quote collection of its own, each line verified against the text.
No. Nothing like it appears in his works or published letters. It is a modern sentence wearing his name.
Probably the refrain of “A Dream Within a Dream” (1849): “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.” — with “The Raven”'s “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” as its only real rival.
Yes — in a letter to George W. Eveleth of 4 January 1848, describing the years of his wife Virginia's tuberculosis and his drinking through her repeated crises.
The line is from “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), the essay in which he reconstructs — with a straight face that readers still argue about — how he engineered “The Raven” choice by choice. In the essay's logic, beauty is the poem's province, death its most melancholy note, and the two meet there.
The refrain itself — “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” — and the chamber-door stanza's “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” The poem was published in 1845 and made Poe famous within weeks.
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Primary text included as part of the documented record for Edgar Allan Poe.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Edgar Allan Poe page.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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