‘There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t met yet’ is engraved beneath an image of the Nobel-winning Irish poet. Only he didn’t write it
Participants in next month’s Dublin marathon are due to receive a medal engraved with a quote attributed to WB Yeats, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Irish poet receiving the Nobel prize in literature. However, there is no record of the quote in question having been written by Yeats.
“There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t met yet” is written along the bottom of the medals, below a portrait of the poet. However, there is “no evidence of any kind” that Yeats wrote those words “either in his numerous articles, essays or book reviews, or in his almost 400 poems and 23 plays”, Yeats Society Sligo director Susan O’Keeffe told the Guardian.
