Befitting the man it memorialized, Thursday’s funeral of John Lewis in Atlanta was an oratorical symphony, a rhetorical masterwork of pride, praise and calls to continue the great man’s work.

Three former presidents spoke, all with emotional admiration for the 80-year-old civil rights leader and longtime Democratic congressman from Georgia’s 5th District, who died on July 17.

Barack Obama delivered the rousing, heartfelt keynote, in which he called on Americans to pay their respects to Lewis by continuing his work at a time when Black lives and voting rights remain at risk, but Bill Clinton and George W. Bush spoke just as powerfully and well of a man who always put truth before politics.

As did Lewis’ niece Sheila Lewis O’Brien, Rev. Dr. Bernice King, activist Xernona Clayton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church where the funeral was held, and the others who spoke.

For a country confined by pandemic and, more important, a culture increasingly dependent on often unreliable social media platforms for the exchange of information, ideas, insight and calls to action, it was like a sustained rainfall in the middle of a drought — a reminder of the unique and necessary artistry of the spoken word.

Lewis certainly understood the power of public eloquence; at the age of 15, he famously heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the radio and it changed his life.

Quiet, calm and absolutely relentless, Lewis was a tireless and democratic speaker, as comfortable on late-night and morning talk shows as he was in Congress or at any VIP table.

Obviously, no one is going to come to praise and bury John Lewis without preparing the best speech possible.

Preparation — the crafting of tone and phrase, of pause and crescendo; the matching of message with music — has fallen out of favor recently. The turn-of-the-millennium rise of personal narrative as a valid and necessary social force gave us a new vernacular — “authenticity,” which often values the awkward and imprecise over the polished, the raw and emotional over the thoughtfully argued or poetically rendered.

Since then, social media has become the preferred manner of social discourse, and with a reliance on immediacy, brevity and niche marketing, much of it is not designed for complex phrasing.

Don’t get me wrong. The validation of personal narratives is one of the biggest cultural revolutions of all time. The definition of what makes anything good or valid, beautiful or important, has long been controlled by a relative few — including those deemed great public speakers. Relaxing the standards of oratory has, like social media, given millions too long kept silent the chance to speak without fear of being disparaged for noneloquence.

Women’s naturally higher-pitched voices kept many of them from lists of great public speakers, and the preference for round vowels eliminates people whose accents do not conform. It’s a talent, like the ability to deliver any great performance, and like any performative talent, it requires experience to perfect.

Yes, there are people, born with natural eloquence, who can deliver impromptu words to make you weep or burn to improve the world this minute.

But watching the powerful, loving and rhetorically adept speeches delivered in honor of John Lewis, it was impossible not to also see the time, care and thought that went into them.

Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times.