“ You could argue that at its core, poetry is about distilling thoughts and emotions into their purest form.”

I really disagree with this statement. Language places heavy constraints on what can and cannot be expressed in poetry more than prose does. If poetry represents human emotion, then it should be easy to translate poetry to another language, but it’s not. Try using the same form of a poem and translate to another language and see if it has the same emotive effect - it’s really difficult to do so.

Poetry seems to express emotions because its constraints has limits on what can be conveyed effectively. As far as I understand, rhymes and meters used in poetry are more of mnemonic techniques from non-literate culture, like a check-sum or error correction mechanism. In post-literate culture, it’s merely a word play.

Maybe I just don’t like poetry.