I hear it is charged against me
While in “When I heard at the close of the day” Whitman hears that he had received plaudits, in this poem he hears a charge against him: that he seeks to destroy institutions. He sounds like a defendant rising to make his plea – like Socrates making his defense against accusations that he was impious and corrupted the youth of Athens. Whitman pleads innocent, saying that he is indifferent to institutions because he has nothing in common with them or their destruction.
“Institutions” can mean significant customs, established organizations, or facilities where people receive care – sometimes without their consent. Whitman managed to live mostly outside of institutions. He never belonged to a church, attended a university, worked for a large company, or joined the army (although for a few years he worked for the federal government). As a young man he was part of a debating society and an active member of the Democratic Party, but by the late 1850s he seems not to have belonged to any organization (except the whimsical “Fred Gray Association,” which was just a group of friends). He worked for various employers, mostly newspapers, but probably by the time he wrote this he had been fired from his last newspaper job (for undermining institutions with editorials in favor of licensing prostitution and tolerating premarital sex). He never joined a literary circle or social reform movement, despite having many close friends who did. His allegiances were at the intimate scale (family and friends) or the large scale (America and democracy), with little in-between. He was passionate about public life, but he frequented unusual sorts of public spaces, or “commons:” ferries, busses, streets, theaters, and hospitals, where he could relate to people on his own terms or according to unheralded working-class norms.
In these new American commons, Whitman found, modified, or invented a new, freer kind of association, which he labeled adhesiveness – the “dear love of comrades” – and promised to “establish” in the cities, fields and woods, and boats of America. This would be a new covenant, an institution (in “States” he suggested that it would be called after his name) but one without edifices, rules, trustees, or arguments – making it fundamentally unlike churches, universities, charities, political parties, and governmental bodies.
The fact that Whitman simultaneously disowns all institutions and vows to establish a new one, without rules or arguments, highlights the utopian nature of his quest. He wants to create an institution without making it institutional; he also wants that institution to perform amazing feats: to save the Union and democracy and spiritualize ordinary life.
Whitman managed to live “in and out of the game.” He never attacked the institution of marriage, but he never came close to getting married. He disdained clergymen, but he believed in God and personal immortality, admired Christ and the Quakers, and drew great inspiration from the Bible. He immersed himself in politics, but then withdrew from active participation, while remaining a passionate proponent of the Union and President Lincoln. He was no sociologist, and he never really confronted the fact that a democratic nation would need many institutions, besides adhesiveness, to sustain civil society, create bases of power outside of the government, transmit culture, and bind people together in mutual interests. But perhaps the power of his prophetic call for adhesion would have been diluted if he had tried to embed it in a more comprehensive analysis and practical program of reform.