This line is Poe’s own, from Chapter 12 of his 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, spoken just after the narrator refuses to describe the cannibalism that followed a lots-drawing among the starving crew. The wording circulating online has one word swapped: Poe wrote that words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality — not “without.”
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality” Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
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Provenance
The source
Work
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Chapter
Chapter 12
First published
July 1838, Harper & Brothers, New York
He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality.
Chapter 12
The popularly shared version reads “without the exquisite horror”; Poe’s text reads “with.”
First serialized in part in the Southern Literary Messenger beginning January 1837, then published complete as a book by Harper & Brothers in July 1838 — see the Wikipedia entry on the novel ↗.
The exact sentence appears verbatim in the Project Gutenberg edition of the full text: Gutenberg e-book #2149 ↗.
Independently confirmed against the Wikisource transcription of Chapter 12 ↗ and the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore’s scholarly text linked above.
✓Public domain
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was first published in 1838, well over a century ago, so the text is in the public domain in the United States.
Fact-check
Often misattributed
The idea and the sentence are genuinely Poe’s, but the version that circulates on quote sites has silently swapped one word, reversing the logic of the sentence.
✕
wordingThe word swap: "without" for "with" misquoted
Poe’s 1838 text reads that words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality — meaning words fall short of conveying that horror. The popular internet version reads without, which inverts the sense. Compare the original at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore’s edition of Chapter 12 ↗.
✕
citationChapter number wrong-chapter
Some quote sites and reader forums cite this as being from a nonexistent “chapter 75” of the book; the novel has only 25 chapters, and the line is in Chapter 12. See Wikisource’s Chapter 12 text ↗.
✓The sentence is authentically Poe’s, from the raft-cannibalism scene in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Chapter 12 — but the widely shared version alters “with” to “without,” as confirmed against the Project Gutenberg text ↗.
Context
Why it mattered
The line appears at the climax of the novel’s most notorious episode: after their ship is wrecked, four starving survivors — Pym, Peters, Augustus, and a sailor named Richard Parker — draw lots to decide who will be killed and eaten so the others can live. Parker draws the fatal splinter and is killed by Peters. Poe’s narrator then declines to describe the meal itself, using this sentence to explain why: language, he says, cannot convey the “exquisite horror” of what actually happened.
The passage became macabrely famous decades later when, in 1884, an English yacht called the Mignonette sank and its starving crew drew lots and killed a cabin boy to survive — a boy who, by coincidence, was also named Richard Parker. The case (R v Dudley and Stephens) became a landmark in English criminal law, and the eerie parallel to Poe’s fiction has been noted by legal historians and Poe scholars ever since.
words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality
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1809-1849 · American writer, poet & literary critic
Poe was a founding figure of American Gothic fiction and the modern detective story, known for tales of psychological terror like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” and poems such as “The Raven.” His only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), is a sea-voyage tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and starvation that later influenced writers including Herman Melville and Jules Verne.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838, ch. 12.
MLA (9th ed.)
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Harper & Brothers, 1838.
APA (7th ed.)
Poe, E. A. (1838). The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Harper & Brothers.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/words-have-no-power-to-impress-the-mind-without-the