Rugged Individualist
It takes one to know one. Hawks are certainly Jeffers' totem animals. They embody his ferocity, singularity, his vision, his coolness. Birds of prey, and hawks in particular, are everywhere in Jeffers poems. A word search of "hawk" in his selected poems comes up with 118 hits. The dude's borderline obsessed.
The qualities he sees in these birds are his own: strong, arrogant, with "intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes" (12), "intemperate and savage" (16). Maybe most important to this poet, who coined the phrase "Inhumanism" to describe his philosophy, is his feeling that these animals have a closer connection to divinity. They remember "the wild God of the world," unlike the "communal people" (15). This is Jeffers in all of his rugged independence—a veritable hawk himself.
Inhumanism
Don't be so all human-o-centric. This poem encapsulates Jeffers' pantheistic belief that humans are not the center of the universe, as much they might think and act like it. They're just a part of the web, and not even close to the most impressive, compared to some regal animals, like hawks.
Inhumanism, he said in his preface to The Double Axe, his career-killing volume of anti-war poems, is "a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. […] It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty" (source).