One of the key goals of macromolecular modeling is to elucidate how macroscale physical properties arise from the microscale behavior of the polymer constituents. For many biological and industrial applications, a direct simulation approach is impractical due to to the wide range of length scales that must be spanned by the model, necessitating physically sound and practically relevant procedures for coarse-graining polymer systems. We present a highly general systematic coarse-graining procedure that maps any detailed polymer model onto effective elastic-chain models at intermediate and large length scales. Our approach defines a continuous flow of coarse-grained models starting from the detailed microscale model, proceeding through an intermediate-scale stretchable, shearable wormlike chain, and finally resolving to a Gaussian chain at the longest lengths. We demonstrate the utility of this procedure by coarse-graining a wormlike chain with periodic rigid kinks, a model relevant for studying DNA−protein arrays and genome packing. The methodology described in this work provides a physically sound foundation for coarse-grained simulation of polymer systems, as well as analytical expressions for chain statistics at intermediate and long length scales.