Nearly 100 art works by 60 artists that can, in varying ways, be linked to the greatest poem of the 20th century are to go on display in the seaside town that gave him inspiration as he wrote it.

An exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate will open on Saturday inspired by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The show tells a fascinating story and also represents something of a first, in that works have not been chosen by professional curators steeped in the subject. Instead, a research group of about 60 local volunteers has spent three years getting to know the difficult but gloriously rewarding poem, choosing works that often have a personal and surprising resonance.

Prof Mike Tooby, who came up with the idea, said forms of community curating existed for social history exhibitions. “It is kind of standard practice to go the community and say, ‘have we got it right?’ So why not for an art exhibition?”

There was no need for project members to know the poem at all. Nor is there a need for the visitors. “I think our job will be done if people leave feeling that they want to know more, about both art and poetry.”

Anny Squire, a volunteer at Margate Museum and project member, had read the poem in the 1970s, but it made little impact on her then. Now, she says: “It is absolutely a daunting poem, but it is so rich and you see something new in it every time.”

She proposed showing Edward Hopper’s 1928 painting Night Windows, being lent by MoMA in New York. The figure could represent Eliot’s “modern woman”, the typist in chapter 3 eating food out of tins, having meaningless sex with her boyfriend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Shore, 1923 (oil on canvas) by Paul Nash (1889-1946). Photograph: Leeds Museums and Galleries/www.bridgemanimages.com

Some of the works in the show are there for apparently direct reasons. For example, the second chapter of the poem is titled A Game of Chess, hence a chess set by the American artist Barbara Kruger.

It was chosen by artist and project member Julia Riddiough, who approached Kruger by email. “I knew she was on the faculty at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] so I took a punt. I was quite humble and apologetic, I didn’t want it to look like we were being grasping or cheeky.

“She came back to me straight away and she was delighted, she really understood the project and what we were trying to do as a group and a community coming together.”

Riddiough said she had often had a love-hate relationship with the project, “but I’ve really learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned to be more open and to listen.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest R. B. Kitaj If Not, Not (1975-76). Photograph: Antonia Reeve/Courtesy National Galleries of Scotland

Other art in the show includes works by Turner, Paul Nash, Lee Miller and RB Kitaj, represented by one of his most famous and complex works If Not, Not, on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland. It is a painting which Kitaj has said relates to the poem, although whole books could be written on how.

The exhibition also tells the story of Eliot in Margate, how he travelled to the town to convalesce after a possible nervous breakdown. Problems were everywhere – marital, work, creative, the world – and he sat looking out from a shelter on Margate Sands hoping for inspiration to continue what became his greatest work.

It came. At one point Eliot writes: “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with Nothing.”

It’s a bleak sentence that has never been used on the tourist posters. But could it be liberatingly positive? “The full stop is crucial,” said Tooby. “What is nothing anyway?”

• Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 3 February-7 May.