In 1932, Karin Boye declared that the past decade had seen a “new poetry” emerge in Swedish literary circles, and although she humbly neglects to acknowledge her own role in its conception, her contemporaries did. Boye is often hailed as one of Sweden’s foremost modernist poets, novelists, and cultural commentators, despite the fact that her work was never widely disseminated beyond the Scandinavian context. As one of the editors of the literary and cultural journal Spektrum, which declared itself the “radical and audacious mouthpiece for the new generation,” and the Swedish translator of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), she was very aware of the Anglo-American and European Modernist movements, and her work is clearly influenced by modernist aesthetic ideals and metaphysics. However, it also offers a separate, distinctly Scandinavian set of interests and values, especially in its relationship to cultural memory and literary tradition. This chapter will argue that Boye’s debut poetry collection Moln (1922) develops a distinctly modernist negotiation of memory and self, integrated into a traditional Scandinavian poetic framework. Her poems evoke imagery reminiscent of Swedish natural romanticism, alongside Old Norse poetics and tropes. Offering new translations of Boye’s poetry, this chapter reveals how these multivalent images, pregnant with history and meaning, are early examples of what Boye in her 1932 critical essay “Språket bakom Logiken” refers to as symbolic “hooks,” or psychological pathways to hidden unconscious insights. The “newness” of Boye’s “new poetry” is thus carefully negotiated in concert with and in memory of the old.