Professor Nicholas Roe has drawn upon new medical evidence to suggest that Keats - one of the main Romantic poets along with Shelley and Lord Byron - may have suffered from foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) caused by his mother's drinking while she was pregnant, the Daily Mail reported.
FAS is a series of mental and physical defects which can occur in a foetus which has had exposure to alcohol.
Roe, chair of the Keats Foundation, has highlighted research by the eminent professor Brian Livesley which suggested that the poet's small head and projecting upper lip are clear symptoms of a foetal alcohol effect.
The research also said the poet's small stature, stocky upper torso and small lower limbs are evidence of a congenital cardio-vascular condition.
In the book, 'John Keats', he argues that FAS may have also left him vulnerable to disease, including the Tuberculosis which killed him in Rome in 1821.
"Keats was born prematurely because his mother drank. Aspects of Keats's physiognomy - the small head and faded hands with swollen veins - suggest symptoms of what we would now call foetal alcohol syndrome which may have rendered him susceptible to disease," he wrote.
Although Keats did have some of the physical attributes associated with FAS, the claim is likely to prove controversial, the paper reported.
Dr Simon Newell, a consultant and senior clinical lecturer in neonatal medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospital, was unconvinced.
"It is true that being a small baby and short of stature is something that goes with FAS. But being small is much more common than the syndrome. Around 60 per cent of people who suffer from the condition have poor IQ and language skills and clearly that was not a problem for Keats," he was quoted as saying by the paper.
Roe's biography charts Keats' fraught relationship with his mother Frances, a known drinker, and examines the way this affected his work and his relationships with women.
Roe also sheds light on the poet's celebrated, but unconsummated, relationship with Fanny Brawne, cited as an inspiration for one of his most well known sonnets, Bright Star.
He is convinced the couple's mutual attraction would have faded if it had not been for Keats' premature death.
Roe also claimed that Keats believed the failure to consummate the relationship was one of the reasons for his illness.
"As he becomes severely ill he attributes the illness to the fact he could not express himself sexually. It was bound up with neurotic ideas that sexual frustration was causing his TB," he wrote.
