Having fled the Russian occupation of his hometown Vyborg, he found work as a civil servant in Stockholm and lived most of his life in poverty.
Largely forgotten for the rest of the eighteenth century, he was valued by some Romantic authors and received greater recognition after 1900.
[1] Frese had a good knowledge of poetry and was familiar with the works of Swedish poets such as Georg Stiernhielm, Sophia Elisabet Brenner, and Gunno Dahlstierna.
According to Kari Tarkiainen, his "extremely rich" poetry is most characterized by its creative puns and its "Baroque exuberance.
Tarkiainen writes of Frese's psalm verses that "there is both longing for death and submission to the inevitable fate, but also warmth and humanity."
[1] In some of his poems, he plays on themes of apocalypse and "blood and thunder," but, in George C. Schoolfield's words, "the essential Frese is serene and wistful."
He included a lengthy section about Vyborg, which had been occupied by the Russians after a long defense, in his poem "Echo å Sweriges Allmänne Frögde-Qwäden" (1715), written on the occasion of Charles XII's return from the Ottoman Empire.