How are the numerous member states of the European Union today to reach proper consensus on an eventual common EU social model? In this meditative and reflective philosophical, literary and social inquiry, first presented as invited lectures at the Institute for European Studies of the Jagiellonian University, Peter McCormick highlights the still largely overlooked conceptual and linguistic resources of the distinctive European high modernist poetry of suffering for freshly rearticulating some of the most basic moral and ethical values at the historical roots of European civilization. Against contrasted readings of modernity in the works of both analytic and hermeneutic philosophers, successive studies investigate the figures of moral discourse, moral perception, and both moral motivation and ethical emancipation in the poetry of the Nobel Laureats, T.S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, and Eugenio Montale. The result is the renewed availability of richly resourceful formulations of fundamental European values for stimulating the ongoing work of achieving appropriate political consensus for a future harmonized European Union social policy.