Edgar Guest wrote with such simple and yet at the same time splendid beauty. He could turn the homeliest and most familiar surroundings into heroic and sacred aspects of the dance of life. Not since Longfellow perhaps had an ordinary American writer appeared with such a capacity for transforming the mundane into the glorious, the consoling, the uplifting. To a nation overwhelmed by a tumultuous ordeal of change, Edgar Guest touched millions with the simplest words of the English language, and lifted their souls, gave wings to their hopes, and fortified them with almost spiritual armor to face the daunting tasks that faced, in Brokaw's words,
our Greatest Generation.