imaginist

English

Etymology

From imagine +‎ -ist.

Noun

imaginist (plural imaginists)

1. An imaginative person.
   • 1815 December (indicated as 1816), [Jane Austen], chapter 3, in Emma: […], volume III, London: […] [Charles Roworth and James Moyes] for John Murray, →OCLC:

     Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?—How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such a groundwork of anticipation as her mind had already made.

   • 1851, Gervase Wheeler, chapter 16, in Rural Homes: Or, Sketches of Houses Suited to American Country Life‎^[1], New York: Scribner, page 280:

     […] there is something in the study itself only appreciable to a simple and earnest heart; it is not sufficiently sensual for the voluptuary, nor chimerical for the speculative imaginist […]

   • 1858, Elizabeth Caroline Grey, chapter 31, in Cousin Harry‎^[2], volume I, London: Hurst & Blackett, page 284:

     Mrs. Malaprop’s generally known axiom, “that it is as well to enter upon married life with a little aversion,” may, in some rare instances, have chanced to be verified. ¶ But contempt—could the severest, most blundering imaginist ever hope to realize the success of so very desperate an experiment?

   • 1920, Melville Davisson Post, chapter 9, in The Sleuth of St. James Square‎^[3], New York: D. Appleton, page 179:

     “Who believed Le Petit,” continued the other. “The world took him to be a French imaginist like Chateaubriand . . . who the devil, Bramwell, supposed there was any truth in this old story? […] ”

2. (literature) One of the Russian poets belonging to the imaginism movement.
   • 1929, Irma Duncan, Allan Ross Macdougall, chapter 16, in Isadora Duncan’s Russian Days and Her Last Years in France‎^[4], London: Victor Gollancz, page 133:

     One evening, with no boisterous or bibulous Imaginists about her and no sign of any other callers, she suggested to the secretary of the school that they ought to play with the ouija board.

   • 1938, N. de Basily, Russia under Soviet Rule: Twenty Years of Bolshevik Experiment‎^[5], London: George Allen & Unwin, Chapter 8, p. 427, note 3:

     […] during the years of the civil war, scarcely any works of pure literature were printed at all. Poetry was recited orally: futurists and their close literary allies, the imaginists, organized poetry soirées, open to the public, in Moscow cafés.

   • 1949, D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature‎^[6], London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Book Two, Chapter 6, pp. 494-5:

     During the worst days of Bolshevík tyranny, when book publishing had become impossible, the imaginists were a living reminder of undying freedom; they were the only independent group that were not afraid to make themselves noticed by the authorities, and they were wonderfully skilled in getting their slender little collections and manifestoes printed by fair means or foul.

References

• OED 2nd edition 1989