Astrophel and Stella and the sonnet form

As someone who holds far more fascination with poetic form than with poetry itself (nothing against poetry personally or artistically, but I just generally tend to prefer prose), I think it's so interesting to watch how these forms, like sonnets, develop into rigidly followed structures as opposed to more of a "suggestion."

I have a friend that always tries to compete in any kind of rigid, conditional artistic contest; sometimes it's a 24-hour film festival, wherein a topic is given and a small crew has 24 hours on the dot to write, shoot, and edit and short film, or a comic book where the writer/artist has only 24 hours to create the whole thing from scratch. As an (amateur) writer myself, I can't imagine something more horrifying and stifling to actual creativity than what essentially boils down to the following of a checklist. My friend, however, thinks he's done his best work under such sorts of structures.

With such a clearly defined set of rules, a sonnet form itself seems like it could eventually run out of words, patterns, tones, etc., so it's nice to go back and read something as old as this and sort of see where it all came from. The last stanza of #7 are:

"Both so and thus, she minding Love shoud be
Placed ever there, gave him this mourning weed,
To honor all their deaths, who for her bleed."

At first, as I read this, I saw the advantages of poetry in the beauty of the language itself, but I wasn't really that taken aback by the meter/rhythm (again, this is coming from a prose person). However, the more I thought about it, the more I thought of old country singers like Hank Williams and Waylon Jennings, songwriters whose tunes followed intense structures just as rigid as the ones established by sonnets and similar forms, and I thought it was pretty hypocritical of me to adore Woody Guthrie songs while dismissing strictly regimented poetry.

Maybe if there was a 2/4 shuffle beat and a warbling voice singing the words, I'd "get it" a little more easily. As it stands, I still don't think I'd buy a book of poetry independently of a class (William Blake and Charles Bukowski being the primary exceptions), but I can at least hold an admiration, especially as a writer, for the challenge of adhering to such a form.