I have been concerned with the problem of communication between East Asian and Western traditions, namely, of what it entails for poets to draw upon foreign traditions, and how critics can make sense of the resultant literary works. In this chapter, I will focus on how interacting with foreign literature can affect a poet's conception of his or her native tradition. However, some earlier themes persist. I will again here be concerned with the problem of identity, not the identity of a literary work or a genre, but of an entire tradition. It has become increasingly common to “problematize” identity and to conceive of identity as fluid. In place of the Aristotelian logic of identity we find hybridity. I have been arguing throughout that the identity of a literary work supervenes or depends on the ontology and social network in which it is placed and by way of which it is interpreted. I will continue with this argument here. But my focus will fan out from a single text or manageable set of texts to the very concept of tradition itself. It should be understood that I am not trying to define a literary tradition, Chinese, English, or any other. My concern is for tradition as Bei Dao 北島 and Ted Hughes have viewed it, in relation to their work and identity. Doing so shifts the focus of this work from relations between literary worlds to the relations between literary worlds and the traditions in which authors and readers place them.