The lasting significance of Conrad Kent Rivers's poetry lies in the fact that he spoke for a generation of young blacks forced to make the transition from the helpless, often hopeless 1950s to the chaotic, rage-filled 1960s. Young blacks, taught in the fifties to contain their individuality for safety's sake, could well understand Rivers's overwhelming concern with loneliness, alienation, and rejection and his responding to the new possibilities of the 1960s with only tentative energy. For Rivers, freedom could be realized only through death, and his poetry expresses that deeply sad helplessness with both intensity and dignity. In the poem "In Defense of Black Poets," he wrote, "A black poet must remember the horrors." Rivers's horrors were those of the sensitive introspective examining the injustices of black pain, sadness, and isolation.

He was born in the North--Atlantic City, New Jersey--to Cora McIver and William Dixon Rivers. There was...