After the May Fourth New Literature Movement and the stormy years of 20s in the early 20th century, scholarly researches on the Book of Ode could not remain the same. New approaches were set forth by Hu Shi, Gu Jie-gang, and others, who heralded the use of vernacular language and new research methods, and launched campaigns such as “abrogating classics and the teachings of the Preface of the Book of Ode ,” and “questioning antiquities and identifying falsities.” Written somehow against this new current in 1927 and dubbed conservative, Wu Kai-sheng’s Shi-yi Hui-tong (詩義會通) held onto the doctrine of the Preface and reinterpreted the Book of Ode in terms of the compositional principle of the Tongcheng School. This paper provides a complete evaluation of Shi-yi Hui-tong by bringing into consideration Wu’s biographical data, his other publications, the academic situation, and the trends of thought in his time. The paper also investigates variant edition of the book and its principle of compilation, elucidates its literary hermeneutic of the Book of Ode, and the characteristic and limitation of its research perspective. The study reveals that Shi-yi Hui-tong writes in the tradition of the Han and the Song scholarship of the classics and philological studies, and therefore makes quality contributions in its heed to lexical interpretation and textual variations, and its integration of various strands of comment. The genuine achievement of Shi-yi Hui-tong, moreover, lies in its explication of the Book of Ode in terms of the literary principle of the Tongcheng School. By looking into the compositional, the linguistic and the literary aspects of the Book of Ode, Wu highlights its rhetoric, form, style and structure, setting an example of aesthetic approach to the classic. Among the contemporary attempts to provide new readings of the Book of Ode, Shi-yi Hui-tong stands out as one that sheds new lights to the literary value of the classic by blending the approach of the Tongcheng School with an otherwise traditional hermeneutic. There are ambiguities in Wu’s attitude toward the two lines of approach that he combines, but that only reflects all the more truthfully the cultural situation of his time, a time when even the hermeneutic of the Book of Ode needs to find its ways to the modern.