In his article “Violence, Violation, and the Limits of Ethics in Robinson Jeffers ‘Hurt Hawks,’” Jordan L. Green uses close reading as well a variety of sources on ethics and the literary idea of the sublime to demonstrate how, in his poem, Jeffers breaks down ethical anthropocentrism. He associates the idea of “transhuman magnificence” with the Romantic notion of the sublime (13). Green refutes the idea put forward by the scholar Peter O’Leary that the speaker is performing “the grim act of an ashamed man” (16). Instead, Green proposes that by killing the hawk the speaker “satisf[ies] the Inhumanist imperative” and “realizes the transhuman magnificence” in doing so (16). In other words, by killing the hawk, the speaker submits himself to a power beyond the limits of the humanist’s blind reverence for life. Euthanasia becomes an act of mercy to an animal that cannot live as it is meant to. While O’Leary refutes Jeffers’s speaker as prophet and poet, Green reasserts the speaker’s place as both in his role as the “catalyst for the
sublime” (17).
He then establishes the humanist Immanuel Kant’s understanding of the sublime in order to display the “Jeffersian sublime” as its alternative (18). Kant claims that the sublime is a temporary overwhelming of the human mind. It is a state entirely in the human mind and can therefore be “overcome by [the] rationality” of that mind (19). According to Green, Jeffers proposes a sublime that exists outside of the human, a “fierce natural sublime” (19). Green believes that by removing the sublime from the solitary confinement of the human mind, “the poem opens up an intellectual and imaginary space in which we can recognize the myth of pure human subjectivity and pure animal objectivity, and consequently extend to the animal our ethical consideration” (21). The ethical purpose of the poem, as Green suggests, is that it “challenges our agency and dominion over the nonhuman, and insists that we reconsider our ethical position toward the animal and nature” (21).
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27670838?origin=JSTOR-pdf (for the full article)