Made familiar in relation to poetic endeavour by the great romantic poet William Wordsworth, the phrase “emotion recollected in tranquillity” refers to re-examining and making meaning from a phase of emotional engagement that has now passed. From recollecting in quieter times the tumult of feeling experienced in the past, the poet can step back from the emotion, and use such passion to create his art. Wordsworth develops his ideas in an appendix to his collected poems:

For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects.