The figure of Baudelaire could be argued to have been conscripted into an excessive amount of paradigmatic constructions over the years. He becomes the name, or cultural face, of a moving configuration of essential problems in discussions of artistic work and subjectivity, and of the ‘modern regime’ – separately and in conjunction. This article analyzes Baudelaire’s afterlife as a mythological one and examines how, across a selection of ‘moments’ over the past three-quarters of a century, the pre-eminence of that figure can come to obscure the traces of a lived – synchronous – process in the oeuvre. Our ability to reconnect with those traces, it seeks to suggest, is key to an understanding of the continued ability of the Baudelaire figure to address our contemporary scene. Moving from Bourdieu’s construction of Baudelaire as nomothète in his sociology of the literary field, it revisits rival co-optations by Jouve and Sartre, in the service of aesthetic and critical ethical accounts respectively, before examining instances of the interweaving of these strands in a brief survey of broadly contemporary work. This survey concludes with a more extended focus on work by contemporary poet Cédric Demangeot, and suggests that the ‘poetic margin’ is where Baudelaire’s powerfully integrated navigation of the adversities of life and of art continues to resonate with greatest urgency.