Heraldic universe?

Lawrence Durrell wrote an essay in 1942 called ‘The Heraldic Universe’, and this seems to connect with him trying to write like George Seferis, at that time. This ‘heraldic’ thing has little meaning. I think it’s just a way of saying “I want my work to be memorable”. That points to a fear of stories being dissolved into sociology, political theories, collective stories which are very predictable. What Durrell describes is just “art”, really. Fixed, just as a detective story printed in 1930 still reads the same way that it did in 1930. I can see that the anxiety is genuine.
It is hard to say why The Waste Land or Seferis poems seem to be eternal and linger in the mind for years afterwards. Why they seem to be outside the pool of narrative generally. I just know that they possess that quality. Any art that lingers in your mind achieves a static quality and falls outside Time. The static quality isn’t something which Durrell invented. Some patterns fascinate us. We go on processing them.
I saw a mention (in Roger Bowen’s book) of an essay by an Arab critic who claimed that the Alexandria Quartet misrepresented Egypt and hadn’t got the real Egypt. I think this sums up what Durrell wanted to avoid – he totally didn’t want to tell typical stories and to be sociologically valid. This is true but I don’t think it’s true that he had a new theory of Time.
Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest. That sums up what novelists DON’T want. Poets too, I suppose.
The “heraldic” thing also reminds me of Edwin Muir and of George Mackay Brown. I think they were both concerned to evade sociology and the predictability of stories which are based in statistics and State knowledge. But I think the ‘heraldic’ word is a miss, the idea is really that stories would be like the Morte D’Arthur, so about knights but not simply heraldic. And The Waste Land has that basis in the Grail Quest and Jessie L Weston’s analysis of it.
I did read the whole Quartet, a long time ago, but I can’t remember any of the characters. Durrell knew that Cavafy and Seferis had that arresting quality, the ability to write personal myth, and he was fascinated by both of them. His theory applies to them, I suspect. It didn’t mean that he could write so strikingly. His theory describes what he wanted to achieve, not what he was actually capable of.