The phrase "workings of imagination" is correct and usable in written English
It can be used when discussing the processes or mechanisms involved in creative thinking or fantasy.
Example: "The artist's work reflects the intricate workings of imagination, bringing to life scenes that exist only in dreams."
Alternatives: "functions of creativity" or "mechanisms of thought."
Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukOVER dinner once an American friend quizzed Charles Dickens about the workings of his imagination.
People who do read poetry, on the other hand, and who know that the workings of the imagination are more complex, probably now dismiss Millay as a mediocrity.
But in recent years he has developed into a choreographer who knows how to recreate onstage the complicated, curious workings of his imagination in subtle dramatic detail.
I suggest only that they follow the advice of the architectural historian John Summerson and "sort out those aging ideas that get encrusted around past creative achievement and clog the proper workings of the imagination in changing times".
A glimpse of the workings of Moore's imagination has, however, just been provided: she had bought the film rights to Axel Madsen's biography of Coco Chanel, and, in an unlikely but revealing bit of casting -- somehow it's easier to imagine Moore as Karl Lagerfeld -- indicated her intention to play the unbuff designer.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus offers a famous description of the workings of the poetic imagination, which "bodies forth / The forms of things unknown" while "the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name".
Dilthey's Poetics of 1887 represents an effort to develop certain psychological concepts to explain the workings of the poetic imagination.
Although Mr. Tadie has done a persuasive job of explicating the intellectual influences on Proust's work -- from Balzac and Zola through Ruskin, Wagner and Carlyle -- he has failed in this volume to give the reader an appreciation of "Remembrance of Things Past" or the workings of the novelist's imagination.
Scurr's own account of the last two years of Robespierre's life provides ample evidence of a man who, however incorruptible in his private conduct, had become profoundly corrupted by power and by the mad workings of his own paranoid imagination.
