Spanish poet and statesman, once regarded as the great poet of doubt and disillusionment, though his rhetoric is no longer found moving.

Núñez de Arce became a journalist and Liberal deputy, took part in the 1868 revolution, and was colonial minister for a time after the Restoration. As a dramatist he had some success, his best play being the historical El haz de leña (1872; “The Bundle of Kindling”), on the imprisonment of Don Carlos, but he attained celebrity with Gritos del combate (1875; “Cries of Combat”)—a volume of verse that tried to give poetic utterance to religious questionings and the current political problems of freedom and order.