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Who really said it

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream

Written by Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849 · American writer, poet & literary critic
Verified Free to reuse

The line closes the first stanza of Poe’s poem “A Dream Within a Dream,” first published in the Boston Flag of Our Union on March 31, 1849 — the wording is confirmed against the 1859 collected edition.

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream” All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. — Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream Within a Dream" (1849)

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Provenance

The source

Work
“A Dream Within a Dream”
First published
March 31, 1849, in The Flag of Our Union (Boston)
Form
24-line lyric poem, two stanzas

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

The line is repeated, in altered interrogative form, at the end of the poem’s second stanza as well.

Read the full poem at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

How we verified this

  • The poem evolved through two earlier drafts — “Imitation” (1827) and “To——” (1829) — before Poe rewrote it almost entirely into the 1849 version, as detailed in the Poe Society’s Mabbott edition notes ↗.
  • It first reached print in the Boston Flag of Our Union on March 31, 1849, per the Wikipedia publication history ↗.
  • The exact text, matching the newspaper printing, is preserved in the 1859 collected Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe on Wikisource ↗.
Public domain

First published in 1849, well before the U.S. public-domain cutoff of 1931, so the poem — and this line from it — carries no copyright restriction.

Context

Why it mattered

“A Dream Within a Dream” reached its final, familiar form late in Poe’s life — a manuscript from 1849 — after two earlier drafts under different titles stretching back to 1827. Poe died just months after its publication.

The poem’s closing image, of grains of sand slipping through a clenched fist on a “surf-tormented shore,” became one of the most anthologized meditations on loss and the unreality of experience in American poetry, and the couplet “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream” is now widely circulated on its own, detached from the poem.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Mortality Doubt Time

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

A Dream Within a Dream (Mabbott scholarly edition)eapoe.org

Scholarly annotated text with publication and manuscript history
A Dream Within a Dreamen.wikisource.org

Full poem text from the 1859 collected Works
A Dream Within a Dreamen.wikipedia.org

Overview article with publication history and analysis
A Dream Within a Dreampoetryfoundation.org

Widely-used modern text of the poem
A Dream Within a Dreampoets.org

Academy of American Poets text and publication note
Edgar Allan Poeen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the author

The author

About Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

1809-1849 · American writer, poet & literary critic

Poe was a central figure of American Romanticism and Gothic fiction, celebrated for poems and stories steeped in mystery and melancholy. “A Dream Within a Dream” is among his most quoted shorter poems, meditating on the fleeting, illusory nature of time and hope.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Poe, Edgar Allan. “A Dream Within a Dream.” The Flag of Our Union, March 31, 1849; reprinted in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2 (New York: Redfield, 1859).

MLA (9th ed.)

Poe, Edgar Allan. “A Dream Within a Dream.” The Flag of Our Union, 31 Mar. 1849.

APA (7th ed.)

Poe, E. A. (1849, March 31). A dream within a dream. The Flag of Our Union.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/all-that-we-see-or-seem-is-but-a-dream-within-a-dream

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