Check out Wilbur's essay, "The Bottles Become New, Too," and you can easily lift twenty minutes of insight.
"The sonnet, I suppose, is the riskiest form of all for an English or American poet to try, if he is troubled by a good memory. There are so many good sonnets in our langauge --or languages-- that it is particularly easy in writing one to bear 'The second burthern of a former child.'"
I don't want to type more. The essay isn't about sonnets, per se, but makes the point that there is nothing antiquated per se about forms like the sonnet, nothing that dates them or links them to particular era, and the only reason people think otherwise is that forms (and rhyme and meter etc.) have been done so much that it takes particular skill not to accidentally invoke older examples and thus make the form seem old fashioned.
I've garbled the message, but I think it's close enough for you to make sense of it.
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