Critics often assume Edgar Lee Masters’s best‐selling 1915 collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology, to be a damning account of small‐town corruption and sexual degeneration. This essay argues the counter‐intuitive claim that the anthology instead confirms a pastoral image of small town life even as it appears to negate this ideal. I suggest that Spoon River Anthology paradoxically confirms the idyllic image of the small Midwestern town through the collection’s representations of adultery, unrestrained lust, and promiscuity – activities that were often associated with an “unnatural” version of heterosexuality in the early twentieth‐century United States. To show that Masters’s critical account of Spoon River’s citizenry serves to substantiate representations of the heartland as an idyllic space for opposite‐sex couplings, I offer close readings of two poems –“Lucinda Matlock” and “Washington McNeely”– and illustrate how they each present readers with compulsory versions of heterosexual couplings that contrast to the “deviant” opposite‐sex activities that saturate the remainder of the text.