The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.

Cocteau suggests that praise can be a kind of misfortune when it is detached from comprehension. For a poet, admiration that does not grasp the work’s inner logic, risks, or intentions reduces the poem to a fashionable object—something “liked” rather than truly encountered. The line also implies a critique of cultural reception: audiences may celebrate the aura of “poetry” or the celebrity of the poet while missing the difficult, precise meanings the art is trying to communicate. In that sense, misunderstanding is worse than hostility, because it converts a living work into a harmless ornament and leaves the poet isolated behind applause.