“Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
— Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949)
Context
In Act 1, Linda Loman defends her failing husband Willy to their sons Biff and Happy, who have grown contemptuous of him. She concedes Willy is no great man, then insists that his ordinariness does not exempt him from moral consideration. The speech is the play's central argument that tragedy belongs to the common man.
How the repetition works
Miller's epizeuxis is argumentative rather than lyrical: Linda repeats 'attention' to enact the very claim she is making, forcing the listener to give the word the weight she demands for the man it names. Where Tennyson's waves, Coleridge's solitude, and Poe's bells use repetition to imitate a sensory state, Miller's doubled word functions as moral insistence — a rhetorical underline rather than a sonic effect. The figure is self-referential: saying 'attention' twice is the proof of concept for the sentence.