Dark Romanticism involves sin, self-destruction, and often supernatural forces.

G.R. Thompson describes the movement as follows:

"Fallen man’s inability fully to comprehend haunting reminders of another, supernatural realm that yet seemed not to exist, the constant perplexity of inexplicable and vastly metaphysical phenomena, a propensity for seemingly perverse atau evil moral choices that had no firm atau fixed measure atau rule, and a sense of nameless guilt combined with a suspicion the external world was a delusive projection of the mind—these were major elements in the vision of man the Dark Romantics opposed to the mainstream of Romantic thought."