Hurt Hawks (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

It is difficult to find much specific criticism of “Hurt Hawks” and his other early, shorter poems. Overshadowing this poem is the larger criticism of Jeffers as a philosophical poet and writer of long, narrative pieces. Many critics begin their discussion of Jeffers’s nature poetry with a synopsis of his fairly obscure personal philosophy. “Inhumanism,” as Jeffers called it, “is a shifting of emphasis from man to not-man. It offers reasonable detachment as the rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy.” This is a repugnant idea to many, including several critics who find Jeffers’s work occasionally contradictory or irrelevant. Kenneth Rexroth, in his book Assays, judged Jeffers’s philosophy “a mass of high-flown statements indulged in for their melodrama alone, and often essentially meaningless.” Robert Boyers, in the Sewanee Review, similarly observed of his poems, “Structurally, they are sound enough, but the texture of these poems is swollen by effusions of philosophizing and by attempts to impose representative signification on characters and actions.” This may apply to the lengths to which the speaker of “Hurt Hawks” goes to impose religious symbolism on the dying bird.

Other critics view Jeffers and his “philosophic-dramatic” poetry as a revolutionary and prophetic work worthy of high praise. In his book The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, Joseph Warren Beach points out that in “Hurt Hawks” and other shorter poems Jeffers “celebrates with greatest unction is the peace that lies in the grave. So great are the sufferings and weariness of men, and indeed of all animated beings, that their profoundest longing is for death.” James Dickey praises Jeffers in Babel to Byzantium, observing that he “fills a position in this country that would simply have been an empty gap without him: that of the pet as prophet, as large-scale philosopher, as doctrine-giver.” Perhaps the greatest praise comes from Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, quoted in the Los Angeles Times declaring Jeffers “undoubtedly one of the great poets of this century.”