Shelley’s opposition to monogamy was rooted in a complex and original philosophy of love. And whether or not he realised it, his view was much closer to Wollstonecraft’s than it was to those of his other heroes, Godwin and Lawrence. He rejected mere […] endorsement of ‘promiscuous concubinage without horror and detestation’. Shelley did not think sex could be divorced from love, and he saw love in elevated, indeed spiritual, terms. He believed we are moved to love by the beauty we see in others – be it ‘in thought, action, or person’. This doctrine was inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley devoted a summer to translating in 1818. In Plato, he found confirmation of Wollstonecraft’s idea that true love represents a partnership of equals. For the poet, there was something almost supernatural about such a union. He says: ‘[W]e would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood.’ Sex, he believed, was a natural and integral part of this mystical union. When we are in love, physical passion irresistibly follows. He condemned chastity as ‘a monkish and evangelical superstition’.
Neil McArthur, “The invention of free love”
