DELILLE, JACQUES French poet, was born at Aigue-Perse in Auvergne. He was an illegitimate child, and was descended by his mother from the chancellor De l'Hopital. He was educated at the college of Lisieux in Paris and became an ele mentary teacher. He gradually acquired a reputation as a poet by his epistles, in which things are not called by their ordinary names but are hinted at by elaborate periphrases. Sugar becomes "le miel americain que du suc des roseaux exprima l'Africain." The publication (1769) of his translation of the Georgics of Virgil made him famous. Voltaire recommended the poet for the next vacant place in the Academy, but his admission was deferred until '774 on the ground of his youth. He showed a real love of nature, of an i8th century cultivated landscape, in his other poems, Jardins (1782), L'Homme des champs (1800), Les trois regnes de la nature (2 vols., 1808).
Delille had become professor of Latin poetry at the College de France, and abbot of Saint-Severin, when the outbreak of the Revolution reduced him to poverty. He retired to St. Die, where he completed his translation of the Aeneid. He emigrated first to Basle and then to Glairesse in Switzerland, and he passed some time in London, chiefly employed in translating Paradise Lost. In 18°2 he was able to return to Paris, where, although nearly blind, he resumed his professorship and his chair at the Academy, but lived in retirement.
His Oeuvres (16 vols.) were published in 1824. See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires, vol. ii.