Nick, Poets often weaken their work by using generalizations unsupported by specific details, or by relying on abstractions instead of concrete imagery. When you say that you as a reader enjoy "the themes that repeat" in poetry, you might not be showing us a great deal, but you are at least offering something specific about your interactions with the art. On the other hand, when you describe poetry as "pure literary expression," you are sinking in the quicksand of abstraction. The phrase is essentially meaningless. It says nothing about what distinguishes poetry from other, presumably less pure, literature such as essays, plays, novels, and short stories.
If your poems rely heavily on abstraction, that might be something you want to work on. You might find it helpful to read some of the poets you admire with special attention to the concrete images in their poems, the evocations not of intangible concepts, but of things a reader can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.
And if child care is a major feature of your daily life, you might think about way of incorporating poetry into that routine. It's not to early in their lives for you to be reading or reciting poems to them as you bathe them, dress them, feed them, burp them, or put them to bed. You'll be enriching their lives and also affirming your connection to the art you care about.
(By the way, speaking as one with no skin in the game since I have zero talent in music or painting, I think you're way off base when you say that those arts demand less of their audiences than poetry does.)
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